Dschoni

My 2 cents: I work a lot with graphical interfaces, that can either be designed via code or using a GUI. The GUI allows to see me, what stuff will look like and generates code, which I could have written myself, but without the visual feedback. So, +1 for 'it depends'.

@Sparhawk @Chappo: For me this question is not about gender politics but about ethymology. And in this lieu, stating that 'officer' is a spelling change from the word 'man' is merely wrong. Obviously in a gender politics lieu, this might be true. And in this case it's exactly what sparhawks says: a no-brainer.

Further addition from my mother tongue (german): As the generic form of undefined gender is masculine, some of this words have been changed in spelling by the gender mainstreaming movement (Professor -> ProfX) . Other generic forms are substituted by 'partizip präsens' constructions (Student -> Studierender). I would consider the first case a somewhat valid answer (although it's rarely used), the second not, as it is a grammatical substitution rather than a change in spelling.

Okay, I'll be more exact. Fireman and firefighter both are compond nouns in the scheme noun+noun with the first being 'fire' in both cases and the second swapped out. I would agree with the womyn one, because here the spelling indeed is changed. The same would hold true for 'firemyn', 'firemon', etc.. It's a hard task to distinguish letter substitutions (example: is 'if' a substitution of 'of' or a different word), but your examples are just badly chosen.

I would consider that answer somewhat wrong because "sounded offensive" doesn't equal "some people feel offended by the use of that word". Furthermore, this is no change in spelling of a word but substitution of a word-stem. Example: Is butterfly and dragonfly the same word, but with different spelling, just because both end in -fly?