Sir: The other day, someone asked me why women never give up. My first instinct was to give a clever comeback: “Because ‘man’ is just a suffix in the word woman.” It felt empowering, but it actually made me curious enough to look up where the word comes from. What I found is even better than my joke.
It turns out that in Old English, the word “mann” didn’t mean a male person at all. It just meant a human being, completely gender-neutral. To specify a female, people added “wīf”, meaning woman, to get “wīfmann”, which eventually turned into the word we use today.
To me, this flips how we look at identity. It means women were never a spin-off, a footnote, or an afterthought built on top of men. Language originally saw both genders as equal halves of being human.
When we understand the actual history of our words, it changes how we see our own strength. Women don’t derive their resilience from anyone else. We aren’t an addition to the story — we have always been the root of it.
Sudha Kerketta
Patna, Bihar
