The Gender-Neutral Bill

One thing about being a Washingtonian?  Free entertainment abounds:
"Gender-neutral bill does away with 'freshmen,' 'penmanship'" - The Associated Press

I've come to accept the extra wordiness of "his or her".  I think the pronoun "s/he" is convenient and clever, and I've got used to this notion of the hypothetical scientist in textbooks being always female.  These were done for my sake, and I appreciate the sentiments, though they grate like nails on chalkboard.  But abolishing the words "penmanship" and "watchman"  and "mankind" (one of my favorite words) ??

Maybe all persons should be individually referred to as "it".  Maybe they would like to regulate the use of "niños" and "hermanos" as well, impound every shopping cart that says No niños en la canasta?  Perhaps it is even discriminatory to refer to children as "children" (oh, the dreaded children's menu, assigned by age and not by appetite!)?

This is all mind-boggling to me.  I grew up viewing words such as "mankind" as completely gender-neutral, and, incidentally, it was the KJV Bible that cemented this in my mind.  Such terms did not ever bring to mind visions of an earth populated solely by men.  Born that man no more may die - obviously, the Christmas carol is not talking only about males.  The suffix "man" in general, as in the word "penmanship," I always took to be synonymous with human - indeed, it could be viewed as an apt abbreviation of "human."

There is a reason dictionary entries contain multiple meanings.  The American Heritage Dictionary, as quoted on thefreedictionary.com, has this interesting usage note:

Traditionally, many writers have used man and words derived from it to designate any or all of the human race regardless of sex. In fact, this is the oldest use of the word. In Old English the principal sense of man was "a human," and the words wer and wyf (or wæpman and wifman) were used to refer to "a male human" and "a female human" respectively.

There you have it.  Trying to outsmart your language just doesn't work.  What does work, apparently, is ignoring the research when it does not speak in your favor, or acknowledging it to a certain extent (e.g. the changes made by Middle English) without acknowledging the origin.  Note that this is as easy to do in academia as it is in pure opinion pieces . . .