19 May 2008

Uncommon Commentary #1

Why is "human" used as a noun nowadays?  My question isn't just rhetorical: the answer is, of course, political correctness (or, to use my own coinage, "totalitarianism light"), but those who are PC could also call us "people," "persons," &c.  Using "humans" to refer to ourselves, in addition to perhaps being ungrammatical, definitely sounds stultified: it's as if a scholar from another planet were writing a treatise about the inhabitants of Earth.