Man, Wisely Wise –

    The right words, 
        but not necessarily in the right gender.

The title comes with blessing and a curse,
somewhere along our way we learned
that we know that we know.

Knowledge for knowledge’s sake sets us apart;
it is in our species name:
Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens has desire and power.
This world is where we live and breathe and are.

We have moved beyond merely sentient,
simply sensing the world,
to being sapient, knowing our place in it.
We have moved beyond merely sapient,
knowing our place,
to sapient sapient.
We have tasted the bitter-sweet fruit.
We know that we know.

Man did not mean male,
it was a species,
in which the male was husbandman,
from hus-bound-Man,
tied to humus, to soil,
our house and home.

Of course it became husband,
but an earlier term was wer-Man
‘male-Man’

The female was wif-Man, which became wife,
then, probably via wi’-Man, became wo-man,
woman.

And Adam said, ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’

…out of Man, not …out of man;
the gender word man was yet unformed

wo-Man meant female-Man
wer-Man meant male-Man.
The human gender term wer survives,
in the human male part of were-wolf.

‘male’ in male and female are unrelated

Female comes from Latin femella,
female-Man.
Male comes from Old French masle
from Latin masculus or malus, male-Man.
Man is the species word,
human regardless of gender,
as were he and she, which were once accents of the same word,
simply meaning a person.
Man is derived from Old English mann,
or earlier Proto-Indo-European mon or man.
Human comes from humus (soil).

Possibly the h at the beginning of human and he
caused a shift of use towards he 
for a person,
leaving she with no role.
so it came to be used for a woman.

If so, then for a time, he meant a person of either sex
while she was only used for women.
Gradually he was applied to men only,
she to women only.

Female stands alone,
It is not fe- prefixing male.
Its origin is in Latin,
coming from femina, or femella,
a female human.
Its use for other species came later.

Male comes from Old French masle
from Latin masculus, or malus,
a male human.

So male in each word is coincidence,
a 14th century spelling confusion,
of similar sounds with similar sense.

But -man in woman and in man
does share the same root:
the word for our species,
Man, any human person.
In Old English the word for male was wǣp or wer
which, with the species suffix mann,
became wǣp-mann, werman.

Werman shortened to man in or before the 13th century
We still use wǣp- or wer as man in were-wolf.
but the word served also as gender neutral
until the last century.
Old English for woman, female-Man,
was wīf-mann or wif.
Wif became wife
wīf-mann became wi’man, woman.
So, unlike female and male,
man and woman have the same root,
Man,
human regardless of gender.