In 1996 it was proposed to replace the word chairman in the statutes of the American Chemical Society. To contribute to the debate, I sent the comment shown below to the society’s magazine, Chemical & Engineering News. I received from the editor the reply:
From: [email protected], 31 Oct 1996
To: [email protected]
Dear Professor Farcasiu: Thank you for your delightful letter. We just published a letter on this topic,(*) so I won’t publish yours. But I certainly had a lift reading it.
Madeleine Jacobs, Editor.
(*) N.B. The letter she published was in favor of replacing the word.
The Gavelperson
The modern time adventures of the English word chairman represent an interesting topic for a linguistic and sociological investigation.
The first observation is that it has become an unacceptable word in academic and press circles; the business world seems to have settled on at least a temporary acceptance of it. As the business world itself is also only temporarily accepted in academic circles, as a source of money over what is squeezed from the government and of negative examples for the newly sprouted courses of ethics in everything, it can be hoped that this inconsistency will be resolved before very long.
The rationale offered is that the word was coined in times of male supremacy and as such it cannot be used for women chairing meetings or departments. As an outsider, this seemed odd to me, because I didn’t think Mrs. Thatcher ever considered being addressed as “Madam Chairman” an insult, but that usage, obviously, means reading chairman as one word, rather than two. To be satisfactory, the suffix “man” had to be removed, and as the first solution it was replaced by “person.”
Consistency entails, however, the same approach whenever “man” appearing as a suffix or prefix in a word can be replaced by “person.” Spokesperson (with spokesman and spokeswoman as derived words) is just another approved case, but when my friends Glassman from Seattle and Grossman from Tucson and their wives come to visit, I should also announce our common acquaintances that the Glasspersons and the Grosspersons are coming. One could also write that common folk for lack of education and very educated folk for sociopolitical reasons often personhandle the language. It is a mystery, however, why the truly and exclusively academic term “freshman” has not been replaced by “freshperson,” with the derivatives “freshman” and “freshwoman.”
The opinions of the learned world, however, have not converged unanimously on the word chairperson. I think that the reason for partial reluctance to it is psychological. Once one starts considering it as composed of two words which have kept their individual meaning, one has to promulgate the use of the derivatives chairman and chairwoman. The educators, who are one of the forces pushing for this linguistic change, know that their charges will have at the end of the process more than a fifty-fifty chance to be spelling-disadvantaged. They can well imagine the horror of having the second derivative word spelled without the i! This difficulty, together with our passion for scientific exactitude, prompts us to note that the first part of our subject is at least as anachronistic as the second. It’s been long since the chairman was distinguished from the rest of the assembly by a special type of seat. Rather it is the person-who-sits-at-the-head- -of-the-table or the person punctuating the debate with some kind of mallet named gavel. Therefore, the proper word to be used henceforth is the gavelperson.
The alternative solution hit me when I was invited to give a talk to a scientific conference and I learned that a colleague was the chair. I objected to this terminology because I could not see why I should sit on my friend George. Later on, I saw in a newsletter of our school that a distinguished alumnus was the chair of the dinner committee. In addition of being given a rather strenuous assignment, I think that he would have been more useful in serving as a bench or a couch.
The most satisfying use of the new terminology I encountered, however, when I attended the retirement party of a secretary that had been with the university for 28 years. I learned then that during her career in the department she had served under three chairs. I concluded that her main task had been to play with the department’s cat.