Man up!

I ran across a tweet this morning which suggested that "manned" as in "manned spaceflight" was derived not from "man" (the word commonly used for a  male human being) but from the Latin for hand "manos[sic]".  In other words the tweet suggests, it is related to manual, and so doesn't actually have sexist roots.

The Latin for hand is manus, and indeed it is the root for things like manual and manuscript and manufacture (and perhaps even manuensis). All referents to things done (or once done) by hand, and all with the stem manu-.

But it is not true that manus is the the root for manned . Historically manned does mean "something done by a group of dudes." The OED has a clear explanation of the origins of the word. The root is mannen from Dutch and Germanic sources. The link expressed by the tweeter to doing things by hand is a folk etymology, and one that I suspect has its origins in actual and overt sexism. I can trace it back to a letter from James Daniels in Physics Today (51(10), 11 (1998). He doesn't give a source for his etymology, and two issues later he will be forcefully corrected by an Oxford linguist.

Why do I think it's overtly sexist? Ah, because that letter from Daniels also makes snide remarks about women and LGBTQ physicists.

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Interestingly "innocent" suffers from a similar etymological mix-up of its Latin root. It's not from noscere (to know) but from nocere (harmless).