Andrey Merkulov. Family (№ 425027)

The Russian language is perhaps the only one in which a persistent impersonal treatment has not been formed. Moreover, this state of affairs did not always exist. In tsarist times there were even an abundance of them: "lord", "mistress", "madam", not to mention countless gradations by class and family, from "counts" and "princes" to "lackeys" and "men" ... During the socialist revolution, which proclaimed the collapse of class society and the equality of all people, as a symbol of this equality, a single universal appeal, which has no division even on the basis of gender, arose - "comrade". But when the union collapsed and the appeal "comrade" became unpopular, they somehow did not have time to come up with others, and men began to be called simply "man", and women - "woman."