Outdoors
The BDN outdoors section brings readers into the woods, waters and wild places of Maine. It features stories on hunting, fishing, wildlife, conservation and recreation, told by people who live these experiences. This section emphasizes hands-on knowledge, field reports, issues, trends and the traditions that define life outside in Maine. Read more Outdoors stories here.
During the Establishment Years of my working life, when I was managing editor of a large Maine daily newspaper, a new and gnarly word began pussyfooting its way into the American lexicon: spokesperson. Oh, how I loathed this trendy bastardization of the language. In the beginning, some linguists and a few moss-backed newspapermen like myself resisted this grammatical aberration.
“Spokesman is perfectly acceptable,” I instructed our desk editors. “Webster’s definition plainly states that a spokesman is a person who speaks for another. We will avoid the use of spokesperson as long as we possibly can.”
Like City Hall, you can’t fight language evolution. It is a steamroller that will have its way with you sooner or later. But you can run. I left daily newspapers, took up outdoor writing and got to spend more time in the woods and on the waters, as far away as I could from spokesperson.
Maybe you can’t run away from these politically correct, gender-neutral abominations, though. There is another one that has crept into the sportsman’s vocabulary. And, my goodness, it is ugly. Fisher. As in, “Did you see him work that fly rod across that pool? A long, smooth line. Double hauls and all. What a skilled fisher.”
Gag me with a #10 Woolly Bugger.
I saw a fisher once. While Matt Libby and I were scouting for some good upland cover near a deadwater not far from Chandler Lake, a fisher bounded across the alder-choked road right in front of the truck. It was furry, mean-looking and built close to the ground. It wasn’t wearing chest waders. As far as we could tell, this fisher was not toting a Sage 5-weight, either.
If you haven’t noticed, fisher has become common in fly-fishing publications. I looked high and low through Fly Tyer, Fly Fisherman and Gray’s Sporting Journal and found the word fisher popping up more and more. James Babb, editor emeritus of Gray’s Sporting Journal, said that he was “ambivalent” about the issue and that Gray’s uses fisher most of the time to avoid offending any readers who might be sensitive to a word that, like fisherman, might not be considered gender neutral.
Hold the phone. Stop the tape. Webster offers the following definitions: Man: an individual human. Fisherman: one who engages in fishing.
Interestingly enough, Webster defines fisher as someone or something that fishes. The other definition, let the record show, is a dark brown North American carnivorous mammal of the weasel family.
As you are beginning to see, this whole linguistic lash-up is becoming complicated. Webster recognizes both “fisherman” and “fisher.” So where does this leave us?
One of America’s most famous fly fishers is Joan Wulff, widow of the late Lee Wulff. She eschews fisher and likes to be called a fly fisherman, thank you very much. My late wife, Diane, no slouch with a fly rod, called herself a fly fisherman as well.
There is no proof, but I suspect that fisher is more than just a product of the political correctness movement. I suspect that it is also a quasi-elitist affectation embraced by the hoity-toity element of the fly-fishing fraternity (oops). Competitive bass anglers wouldn’t be caught dead calling themselves bass fishers, would they? What about youngsters who dunk worms off bridges? Are they fishers?
In the Northwoods Sporting Journal, an outdoor monthly hunting and fishing paper that I edit, fisherman remains the standard. Whenever possible, fisher winds up in the delete file.
But, as with that other ugly word spokesperson, I can feel the steamroller rumbling off in the distance.
Inevitably, fisher will prevail. Fisherman, one of my favorite words, will go the way of so many other perfectly useful words that are now just a memory.