Good WorkManship in 2025

They seem to mean slightly different things to me.although both are subjective.where perhaps we mean to a high professional standard which aligns to BS7671.

Do you mean as in male and female?  If so is the word man not also in woman ?

Gary

In years gone by people would use the term Master and Slave when talking about computers HDDs (hard disks drives)

While the terms "master" and "slave" are technically still used in contexts like older hard drive configurations, the technology industry is moving away from them due to their negative connotations
. Many companies, including Microsoft and GitHub, have adopted more neutral terminology such as "primary/replica," "main," or "primary/secondary"

Sergio Fernandez said:

What I was trying to get to was the use of the word Man in workmanship in the same way that people would use the term man hour.  This does not feel like inclusive language.

Interesting. The term is used in legislation (including Building Regulations) as per my earlier post.

I suppose this type of word, though, is more like the words 'manslaughter' and 'human' which to the best of my knowledge are currently not considered be non--inclusive.

BS 7671 contains the word 'human' a total of 7 times (not including titles of standards in Appendix 1).

There are two standards referenced in Appendix 1, that have, in their titles, 'man-machine interface', which I guess not a lot can be done about directly?

I do understand that the term Workmanship is still used in legislation but maybe there needs to be an update.  In the same way we now use the term Police Officer rather than Police Man or Fire Fighter rather than Fireman.  Historically the police and fire service were male or predominantly male work places.  

'man-machine interface' is largely being superseded by 'human computer interface' in the IT world.

Sergio Fernandez said:

I do understand that the term Workmanship is still used in legislation but maybe there needs to be an update.  In the same way we now use the term Police Officer rather than Police Man or Fire Fighter rather than Fireman.  Historically the police and fire service were male or predominantly male work places.  

So, where do you stand on the word 'human' ?

Also, how do we deal with the other words that inadvertently use the term 'man', like 'management', 'manipulate', etc, where the etymology has nothing to do with the word 'man' ?

These types of discussion are really for BSI and IEC committees that develop the rules by which standards are drafted ... see BS 0.

Interesting discussion, though

The man in manipulate is not 'male' but  'hand'  like manual. (Not 'read the manual', the other one..  le main etc.  )

I have no problem with gender matched word endings as such, and have found I can annoy my daughter when she is reading the map in the car by calling her the navigatrix, not the navigator.

Language changes, we no longer talk about wer and wyf, for man and woman,

Though the derived 'wife' persists, to be paired with 'husband' - which actually means one bound to a particular dwelling (hus ~ house + band - attached~bound ~ bonded)

we have lost the informal third person (thou / thee) in favour of the formal and plural (you) and if folk would prefer some  alternative to the current, then they can use it. 

If we actually mean womankind, we should be happy to say so but we need to understand what we are doing rather than mucking about with odd words.

Workmanship - the quality or the craft of being a worker, is reasonable, and is not usually used to exclude the possibility that the worker is female.

I'd be wary of jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

Mike

While in our industry (utilities & MEP) we're often making reference to an HMI, but I've never heard of an MMI except perhaps in outdated literature.

Leader/Follower is one I've come across recently.

One of the ?challenges/opportunities? is that the different alternative pairings each carry a subtly different connotation.

Eeh, Mike, you are on good form this evening. :-)

Eeh, Mike, you are on good form this evening. :-)