Words I Hate III

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People.


When I hear the word “man” or “mankind,” I hear it as if King Leonidas was proclaiming it between staccato spit-bursts and Shpartahs.

When I hear the word “people,” I think of the shaggy orange monster in that Bugs Bunny flick: “PEEE-puhl!” Even worse, if you really think about the pronunciation of the word, it’s funny. Funny sounding. Maybe its five straight years raising two little girls constantly using the words “pee-pee” and “poopie,” but “people” has an infantile ring to it, to me. And it kinda rhymes with “weeble.” You know, those little kiddie toys that wobble but don’t fall down.

For some reason, we’re not allowed to say “man” anymore, when referring to groups of men and women. You must now say “people.”

Case in point is that History channel show, “Life After People.” If I cared at all about it, I’d examine and possibly skewer it for it’s anti-life bias (meaning, of course, human life, as in the fringe eco belief that man is the sole scourge of Mother Earth). But I didn’t watch it and don’t intend to. I just find the show’s title silly-sounding. Fifteen or twenty years ago, it would have been called “Life After Man.”

There was a horrible SF movie I recall in the mid-70s (actually, I recall seeing commercials for it on cable-TV in its infancy; I was too young to be allowed to see the movie itself). Though I remember absolutely nothing about it, save for a mascara-smeared clown with a futuristic gun, it had the awesome title, “The Last Days of Man on Earth.”

How would this movie ever be remade today, assuming Hollywood even wanted to do so? How many committees and Ivy League English Department feminists would have to be consulted for the producers to come up with an acceptable title?

“The Last Days of People on Earth.”

Sounds epic, don’t it?