Complex Numbers

Hunter

Hunter
an entry for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]

You know what's bugged me for a long time? Well, yes, okay, "lots of things." But to keep things related to the topic:

Hunting and fishing are two of our oldest occupations. They existed in our evolutionary history long before we were recognizably human, and these occupations are followed today by, for example, cats, as well as many humans, whether for survival, commerce, or recreation. Yes, I know the joke about prostitution being the oldest profession, but the point there is the exchange of goods for services, whereas hunting and fishing provide their own goods, ones you could eat. Or trade to the prostitute.

That's not what's bugged me, though. That's just the background. The annoyance is this: in English, one who hunts is called a hunter. Okay, that makes sense and follows the general rules of English. And yet, one who fishes is, traditionally, called a fisherman.

So why is that, or, alternatively, why isn't one who hunts called a hunterman? It's a deep linguistic mystery.

Now, yes, the language seems to be moving, in its slow plod toward inclusivity, toward "fisher." But that's not my point. My point is that, while both occupations can be and, apparently, were practiced by all genders, we still ended up with "hunter" for anyone who hunts, but "fisherman" for someone who fishes (and "fishwife" for someone who sells the fish, but in that case "wife" meant "woman" and not "married woman," as it used to in Middle English and earlier).

As a side note, anthropologists used to assume that in hunter-gatherer societies, it was the men who hunted and the women who gathered. This was an unfortunate projection of then-dominant gender roles upon primitive peoples, which is yet another reason evolutionary psychology is not to be trusted. Turns out, in most cases, everyone participates. Or they don't survive.

Anyway. None of this explains why "hunter" also became the name for a shade of green.

Apparently, though I don't have a reliable source for this, hunters used to wear that color (which hunters, I don't know; I assume it's ones in the US and/or UK because we're talking about English, here). But by the time "hunter" was used to describe that shade of green, hunters had already started switching to more subdued, camouflage-like colors.

As with many words, though, the definition stuck even as the thing it referred to changed. Now you're more likely to see hunters in the US wearing bright orange camouflage—I gather this works because their principal prey, deer, don't have the visual color receptors to distinguish that from green/olive camo, but it does help the hunters to be seen by other hunters, reducing the incidence of hilarious tragedy.