Kowani wrote:Point of order-Dictionaries evolve slower than actual language does.
And language is frustratingly painfully slow to evolve, even moreso now because of our longer lifespans.
However, you'll note many of the expressions noted in the dictionary are used today and are used in a gender neutral fashion. To zero in on those:
a man could get killed there
she's your man
The men have been on strike for several weeks.
nine men on each side
a Bowdoin man
when I heard the siren, I knew it was the Man
We should control anything that affects black people. Why should The Man control us?
Presuming it's the same guy, Jimmy Denham, author of the last quote, is still a professor in southern florida.
From the other dictionary:
‘places untouched by the ravages of man’
‘a man could buy a lot with eighteen million dollars’
‘Cro-Magnon man’
Clearly, it's not only male humans who have the ability to buy a lot of things with 18 million dollars, nor is it only male humans that ravage our environment.
Nor does your hypothetical exception regarding asserted extremely recent usage change etymology of manhole, a term invented in 1769, as far as we can tell.