I happened to be in Berkeley California recently, walking down a liberal street at a fairly liberal pace, looking ahead, not at my feet. Sometimes you encounter large steel discs covering holes along the pavement and this particular plate was askew on its circular surface so that the edge formed a protruding lip. I tripped on said lip and kinda sorta almost hit the deck. In a moment of public embarrassment, I blurted out, fuckin’ manhole cover! Next thing I knew, I was cuffed and hauled into a liberal police precinct.

You see, you can no longer say manhole cover in Berkeley. Females apparently may take offense at references to male holes. A pretty insensitive fuck up on my part. The manhole cover is now officially a maintenance cover and now, apparently, all of our holes are safe from discrimination and social injustice and men who want to crawl into every hole they see.

It turns out there’s tons of stuff you can’t say today in America. Hundreds of words and phrases and colloquialisms have been commandeered, hijacked, fuckin’ stolen because someone or some group claims they mean something they most certainly do not. Feelings may get hurt, noses may get pushed out of shape or some gal may think her safe space is being invaded should the wrong word be spoken with the wrong imagined gender code. So they’re taking words out of our dictionaries – in broad daylight.

I want them back.

This illegal confiscation is most often presented as a battle between liberal and conservative, old-school and new-school, male vs, female. It’s none of those, rather it’s a clash between basic human intelligence and stupidity, normal common sense vs. paranoid illusions of non-existent slights.

So, what kind of work do you do?
I’m a councilperson.
Ya, well, I’m a Sagittarius, but I asked you about your job.
And I told you, I’m a councilperson.
So you counsel people?
No, I’m on the city council.
Oh, you’re a councilman.
Well, we can’t call ourselves that anymore.
That’s pretty stupid. “Councilman” is a generic term to describe anyone who serves on the “council” … been that way since the Revolution. We all know who are girls and boys among the body known as councilmen. You were elected to protect our words you pathetic fuck.

So, essentially, now you can’t say any word or phrase if “man” is a part of it. Manpower is out. If you need more people to perform a task, you have to say we need more personpower and, of course, no one will know what you mean. If you’re on a boat and someone falls out, you can’t shout man overboard! you’ll need to scream something like gender-neutral life form over the side … people will drown. You can’t go on a manhunt even if the hunted is actually a man because some chick in Berkeley will say, “how come men are always the ones getting hunted for?” If a man-eating triceratops goes on a killing spree the newspapers will have to report it as man-and-woman-eating predator is on the loose.

Did you know that men are perfectly fine with titles like Secretary of State, but that women are seriously offended by the sexist moniker? Yep, if called on by the president to serve they insist on being called Administrative Professional of State? In fact, the Secretary of Education, a women, took things a step further. She banned the teaching of “penmanship” in grammar school until they changed the name of it to pengirlship.

I don’t intend to live this way. They can take your words, but they sure as fuck aren’t gonna take mine. I’m gonna spew “man” words in mixed company like I was, well, a man on a mission. In the middle of nebulous conversions, I’m just gonna start rattling off all the “man” hits – one-man band, manifold, Culligan man, manslaughter.

Friends, man your battle stations (see what I did there?). They can try to create a politically-correct society but they shall never be allowed to touch our dictionaries.

Photo credit: ant.photos on Visual Hunt/ CC BY-NC-ND