Words For Humankind

Even casual conversations can reveal the linguistic inconsistency of the average person.  When a person does not carefully affiliate certain words with certain concepts, language can become a barrier to comprehension, not a facilitator.  Yes, words are nothing more than constructs with arbitrary meanings, but for communication to be effective, people must use their words consistently.

There are those who are quick to defend the use of the word "mankind" to refer to humanity as a whole, acting as if humanity and man are perfectly interchangeable words.  At first, the arbitrariness of language might make this seem entirely legitimate, but a key fact exposes the flaw with doing so.  Reversing the typical language used illustrates the flaw of using a word referring to one gender as if it refers to all humans.

If you start referring to humankind, both men and women, as "womankind," of course, these conservative people would likely object, and rightly so.  But their objection would only reveal that they are aware of the exact reason why a gender-specific word can never truly refer to all of humanity.  Instead of consistently admitting that neither mankind nor womankind could possibly be a suitable word for collective humanity, they would likely retreat behind an appeal to tradition, saying that a past generation's use of a word somehow legitimizes a misleading definition.

The inherent fault of traditions is that they can have no authority.  They merely reflect the norms or expectations of previous generations, and those expectations are often rooted purely in fallacious assumptions or preferences.  Tradition is what desperate, unintelligent, or careless people retreat to when they have nothing else to hide behind.  It is the duty of rationalists to expose, uproot, and destroy asinine traditions wherever they appear.

The word for humankind is humankind--or something similar like humanity or humans.  Since humanity is not comprised of just men or just women, any linguistic technique which does not acknowledge both fails to correctly describe reality.  Of course "womankind" does not encompass all of humanity, but neither does "mankind."  It takes only a few moments of reflection to understand this.