Is it only me, or is everyone else growing exasperated with the ongoing turmoil of what can be said that won't offend somebody else? I was in a restaurant the other day and they had posted a sign which read "Now Hiring Wait Staff". This seemed to me to be about the most stilted phrase I had yet encountered. It would have been far better had it read "?Waiters and Waitresses". Of course, then I suppose some argument would have arisen that it should have been waitresses before waiters. It always seems like a no win situation. Personally, I feel sorry for someone who is offended by hearing some all-inclusive term used which carries denotations of all male or everyone, depending on the circumstances used. How do these people feel when some juvenile-minded driver displays to them the single finger gesture of disrespect? I can only presume that they find it necessary to take the rest of the day off and lie quietly at home in bed!
You know, if you look at it from a different angle, it is not the females who have been shortchanged, but rather it is the males. After all, women have always had group nouns that meant women and only women. Examples are waitresses, hostesses, and even the noun women. Men have similar nouns but those same nouns have also had to share the responsibility of conveying the idea of not just a group of males only, but of both men and women. Does anyone in this day and age believe that "all MEN were created equal" applies only to the males of the species? Of course not and this only serves to illustrate this point that males have been shortchanged in the noun department.
All in all, I guess I am just bored with it. The arguments over the use of politically correct terminology seems like a pretty small tempest compared with the real problems of the world. We really need to look at finding ways to solve some of the big problems like drugs, crime, and racism before we worry about some petty thing like this.