Boldly Go Where No MAN Has Gone Before!

My 12-year-old daughter, Malea, likes her some Star Trek.  The original series, that is.  I think she's watched every episode from every season twice.  So last night I asked her if she wanted to see one of the more recent films (2009) and, of course, she said that she did.

When we got to the end where Spock (the Spock played by Leonard Nimoy) does the voice-over send-off while the viewer gets a look at the Enterprise--to the delight of all who loved the original series--I heard Malea say something like "cool" or "awesome."  Any lover of Star Trek should have such a reaction.

But at the very end of the monologue there was a small surprise in store for her: "Space, the final frontier.  These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.  It's mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before!"

I asked her if she liked the film.  "Yeah, it was really good.  But they screwed up the ending."

"What do you mean?"

"They said 'to boldly go where no one has gone before.'  It's 'where no man has gone before.'  Why did they screw up the ending?"

I then had to briefly explain to her that this was likely an instance of political correctness, and that there are many who think that girls like her are either not smart enough to distinguish between gender neutral tokens of the English word "man/men" and gender specific tokens of "man/men," or feel that helpless girls are being oppressed by the word.

It was a bit of a letdown.

This is another excellent example of the silliness of PC-whipped progressives.  The truth (within the fictional world) is that the Enterprise is boldly going where no man (i.e. for the dull-witted--where no human, man, and woman)  has gone before, not where no one has gone before, for almost every episode consists in going where persons of an alien race have gone before!  So instead of keeping a perfectly intelligible sentence, it is replaced (previously in some iteration of the series before that movie) with a more politically correct sentence which is false!

Better to say "boldly go where no human has gone before," since at least that is true.  But presumably whoever made the change had at least some aesthetic sensibilities and preferred "no one" because it sounds less clunky than "human."   Anyone with common sense would have just left the sentence alone.  But the left must infuse politics into everything.