Recently I received an email that read, in part: “(W)hether you have a brother, a buddy, or a boyfriend, don’t let your man friend leave home without his man tank, this essential ... ‘THE MANK’.”
Let’s set aside for the moment the debate over whether the tank top can be considered any more essential to the man of 2010 than the man of 1810. What I take issue with is the stank of “mank”.
I get the idea behind it, really I do. The world of fashion and style has a long history of employing such portmanteau words (a term describing these mashed-up words first employed by a master of the art, author Lewis Carroll), and in many cases it does the job perfectly.
But it’s linguistically lazy to simply “manglicise” (oops, see?) a word to show it’s a male version or man-appropriate, and it can lead to confusion. One of the all-time offenders (of which I’ve been guilty) is “murse”. Depending on the situation, it can mean either “man purse” or “male nurse”.
And since when do we need to explicitly gender-specify our entourages? Does it make anything more clear (other than the speaker’s attempt to sound clever) when you refer to your all-male posse as a “mantourage” — or group of mothers as a “momtourage” for that matter?
So can we all agree to beat our prefixes into plowshares, drop the “man” act and step away from the lexicographical slippery slope? Otherwise it’s going to start making me angry.
And trust me, you won’t like me when I’m “mangry”.