Light On Dark Water

Referring to people as “humans,” as in the sentence “humans have always created art.”

I take it to be one of the many constructs which English speakers have come up with to avoid the gendered nature of our language; in the past one might have said (and many of us would still say) “man has always created art.” I sympathize with the impulse, but “humans” really bothers me, because it suggests a quasi-scientific distancing, as if one is referring to another species. It’s the way extraterrestrials talk in science fiction. “I must say, Captain, the ways of humans are often quite puzzling to me.” If one is determined to avoid gender, “people” seems a much better term.

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