I'd like someone to tell me how it is possible to be a liberal and not support striking teachers.

[tama]

275. Jumping into personal attack

and/or blame game is also a linguistic pattern. Personhood is linguistic category with much variation between languages, as is gender. For example my language does not have category of gender for all nouns as most Indo-European languages still do, and no gender division in 3rd person pronoun.

According to the dynamical school of general linguistics that I prefer to Chomsky, language is creative process of two dynamically conflicting general principles: 1) economy (least effort to express a meaning) and 2) power to express as many meanings as possible of the totality of all of our relations.

"Man" as generative pronoun for all humans including womans is an expression of the principle of economy. A more politically correct expression, (and women/(wo)men/humans) would, as you say, take extra effort, and it does not come naturally when the meaning expressed has little or nothing to do with gender equality or lack of.

PS: I was searching for the English equivalent for the technical of term general linguistics that describes the difference of more economic utterance 'man' and less economic utterances woman or human, which in my language is 'tunnusmerkillinen'. Sadly or funnily enough, the first and only word I found in quick search war "discriminatory".

I don't suggest or support giving up and just accepting the inherent sexism of English, on the contrary, but my point is that to change it needs linguistic innovations that don't try to fight against the principle of economy - which has already removed gender articles from English leaving only definite and indefinite article to express aspectual difference.