That’s a good question—though I’m not sure I can think of a good answer.
I know that, in most of my writing, I tend to use ‘they’ as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun… when I wrote ‘Man is a rational animal, etc’, I was aware that I could have rephrased the whole thing to be gender-neutral… but when writing, I felt that it wouldn’t have provided the same feeling—short, sharp, direct, to-the-point. The capitalized term ‘Man’ is, for good or ill, shorter than the word ‘humanity’, and “Man is a rational animal” has a different sense about it than (I wanted to insert ‘the mealy-mouthed’ here, which isn’t a term I remember actually having used) “humans are rational creatures”.
There’s probably something Dark-Artish in there somewhere, though it wasn’t a conscious invocation thereof.
That’s a good question—though I’m not sure I can think of a good answer.
I know that, in most of my writing, I tend to use ‘they’ as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun… when I wrote ‘Man is a rational animal, etc’, I was aware that I could have rephrased the whole thing to be gender-neutral… but when writing, I felt that it wouldn’t have provided the same feeling—short, sharp, direct, to-the-point. The capitalized term ‘Man’ is, for good or ill, shorter than the word ‘humanity’, and “Man is a rational animal” has a different sense about it than (I wanted to insert ‘the mealy-mouthed’ here, which isn’t a term I remember actually having used) “humans are rational creatures”.
There’s probably something Dark-Artish in there somewhere, though it wasn’t a conscious invocation thereof.