Retta Blaney at the National Catholic Reporter doesn’t like the new production of Godspell, but her chief beef is with the language of the King James Version that the script uses:
all the scriptural references featured the “God and men,” “every man who humbles himself” and “nurses a grudge against his brother” viewpoint.
I had this same complaint when I reviewed the 30th anniversary off-Broadway revival in 2000 for NCR. I mentioned this to Schwartz during a telephone interview then and he told me inclusive language “fails as art” and that he has always felt men represented everyone. I told him I had never felt included in the word men. Why would I? I’m not a man. I suggested substitutes like neighbor or brothers and sisters and he said he liked the idea of using neighbor and would speak to the director, Shawn Rozsa. I didn’t revisit that production so I don’t know if the changes were made, but here we are in 2011 for the trumpeted first Broadway revival, and the language is as exclusive as ever.
I have noticed that the New York Times and most journals use man and men to mean all human beings. Man is still current to mean a human being: ”man-eating shark,” “men-working,” “Age of Man” (National Geographic), “Hope in the Age of Man” (New York Times) “A Man-Made World” (The Economist),”The Museum of Man” (San Diego), etc.
If man or men is does cannot in any context include all members of the human race, nor can men and women, because that phrase des not include children. One would have to say male and female (really awkward) or use an abstraction or a collective noun. As Stephen Schwartz said, it fails as art.
The tortured syntax and plain bad-grammar in many alterations of hymns and biblical translations is a result of a feminist “church speak” that is more artificial than using thee and thou (which were ordinary usage at one point).
One example of feminist syntax is the greeting by priests of “sisters and brothers.” English has what Fowler called cast-iron idioms: Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters. When one alters them, it sounds very odd and unidiomatic.