Forthrightly, this incident of Jan. 4, in which U.S. Congress ended an opening prayer with the phrase “amen and awomen”, is embarrassing. Not only does it demonstrate a humorous failure of understanding the linguistics of the word, it demonstrates the absurdity of the extent of “political correctness” that is present regarding gender equality.

To clarify, gender equality is indeed a matter that should be supported. However, when individuals go to the extent of being upset because of the sequence of letters that make up a word, specifically a word that has absolutely nothing to do with gender, it serves no purpose than to make those in power look ridiculous.

The rationale for this was to make the prayer represent both men and women, as “amen” only represents men. But this is the highest extent of folly, because the word “amen”, as derived from the Hebrew language, speaks nothing to gender, despite the coincidental presence of the letters “men” in it. “Amen” comes from a Hebrew word of the same transliterated spelling, and was used to end prayers even in the ancient days of the Kingdom of Israel, as recorded in the Judeo-Christian Bible. The loose translated meaning of the word is “truth”, and context gives it a more specific meaning of “let it be so”. Thus, it has nothing to do with gender, and it does not have linguistic similarities to the Hebrew word for man, which is “ha’a’dam”. It was passed to Greek and Latin with the same use, and carries to almost every major world language, including Spanish, French, German, Chinese, and Arabic among others.

Only a high degree of close-mindedness would assume that English evolved the word “amen” to exclude women (maliciously or not), thus “awomen” is a word that should be used to equalize the matter. Nearly every word used in any language comes from the influence of another language, or a word used in a regional language that existed before it, all the way back to the original languages, which are unknown, but the point still remains. The presence of the letter sequences “men” or “man” within another word does not indicate that it is a gender-specific word.