The Implicatures of Prick

L. Horn in an essay for the Linguistic Society of America, 'Lexical
pragmatics meets he-man', where he refers to



"[T]he known diachrony of "man" [...] in
which a super-set sex-NEUTRAL use
gradually yielded to the cognitively
prototypic 'sense' [...] In English,
an earlier symmetric "ABC" set-up gave
way to an imbalanced "AAB" structure
that has prevailed since the mediaeval period.



OE "mann": --> MnE "man"


"werman", "wifman" "human "male"
"waepnedman" person" (vs. "woman")



"Significantly the basic level of categorisation
(Rosch 1978) for reference to 'human' was in OE at
the super-set level. ... The English schema is
mirrored in Romance with originally gender-neutral
"homo" picking up the [+male] feature and replacing
"vir." ... What the diachrony of "man" reveals is
not the imperialism of BROADENING ... but
the USURPATION of the sex-neutral that yields
NARROWING."

Etc.