In this sense it's return to 'popular usage' in the sixties,
with it's romantic commitment to 'getting back to the land'
is a lovely return of an anachronism, and about as useful.
As some will also recall, it took a long time for women to
finally be allowed up front to drive 'the big bus' in the
various 'hippie kults' as it would in the main stream culture
to allow them to man the helm of Korporate Amerika.
Half of what made the philology of the seventies so much
fun was the absolutely comical efforts to 'degenderfy' the
language as some grand fob of 'liberal concern' for "women's issues".
It is a sad tragedy that 'wer' never made it back into the
language as the alternative to 'man' as it would have been
nicer to have WerChair's rather than ChairPerson - since the
suffix '-person' carries, embedded in it, the Patriarchal
approach of 'son' as the continuing repression of the Male
Dominated Society. { we lost the effort to transubstantiate
the suffix '-perkin' as being at least gender neutral. }
Granted of course the thought of someone
'Wering the Helm'
does have some small emotional ANGST in it...
And it would have lead to the question of whether or
not a werwolf was a 'Male Wolf', a person who turns
into a wolf by the light of the full moon, or merely
a gender neutralization....
hum... maybe that's what caused all the androgeny stuff....
ciao
drieux
ps: it would have been nicer, had folks also taken a little
time to note the distinctions for 'love' in greek, with
the classical trinitarianism of 'eros', 'philos' and 'agape'
but such would have required accepting that somethings really
do not change merely because there is a 'youth rebellion' going on.