ABSTRACT
Few things in life are as fickle as words. We assume that just because they mean something to us then they must mean the same to everyone else. When two people of different religious traditions are talking to each other, it’s particularly urgent to remember that just because they happen to be using the same words doesn’t mean that they are saying the same thing. The point is that, for all that words are intrinsically common property, occupying the social space between us all, our actual experience of every word has its own unique history, imbuing our sense of it with an unrepeatable, incommunicable bouquet of associations and memories, intuitions half-uttered and possibilities awaiting exploration. This is never more the case than when we utter the words ‘man’ (in the generic sense) or ‘human’. They evoke at once the splendid democratic grandeur of the Fanfare for the Common Man, the solemn ethical challenge of a declaration of ‘human rights’, the ‘weakness of human nature’ and the ongoing trauma of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. Over the last few decades, too, we have learned that ‘man’ can obscure ‘woman’.
