There's the slow creep in language to make nouns for occupations and the like into nongendered versions. Chairman becomes chair; fireman becomes fire fighter. In the latter, I'm sure the alliteration helped it catch on. The gender-equality-friendly versions sound weird at first, but eventually a favorable version is settled on and comes into popular use.
Some people hate this; they see it as an overcorrection of long-accepted language. Some people don't think about it. I lean toward the nongendered usage myself. Sometimes I'm editing an article that tries to cheekily reference "mice and men." As my fingers deftly swipe the keys to recast this as "mice and humans," I think to myself, Nice try, dude, except:
- you're not Steinbeck, who was writing literature — not to mention his story was primarily about men;
- this isn't 1937; and
- a scientific research article is not the venue in which to make your mark as a well-read renaissance type when you're handing over your writing to an all-female copy editing staff that is not about to give you a break because, oh, at least your tired old quip wasn't a Shakespeare quote.
One place where the battlefield over usage remains empty and uncontested is the idiom poor man's. It seems no one is up in arms about this one. Google returned 1.7 million hits for "poor man's" and less than 30,000 for "poor person's"; moreover, the results for the latter search were often literally talking about the realities of poverty.
I do admit it's a little convenient that the movement responsible for altering so many terms of respect doesn't seem to care about women's representation in a term that's used to insult. Yet at the same time, I wonder if the larger meaning behind this particular term doesn't contribute to the lack of effort to change it.
I'll use the example that started me thinking about this: a coupon to the water park Geauga Lake's Wildwater Kingdom. Now it is owned by Cedar Fair (the company that owns the superlative Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio), but for years, Geauga Lake was an amusement park, in competition with Cedar Point because of their relatively close proximity to each other. I saw the coupon and mused to myself that Geauga Lake was the poor man's Cedar Point.
Now, here is the distinction in the usage as I see it. The term poor man's is loaded from years of use suggesting that a competitor uses a cheaper imitation to appeal to the less affluent. It's not particularly flattering to either party, but generally the barb is aimed at the seller, not the buyer. Calling X "a poor man's Y" is intended to insult X for having an inferior product, not to insult the consumer who chooses X.
However, the nongendered version, "poor person's" (so chosen because it's the most obvious and because of that catchy alliteration again), doesn't have the same cachet. It sounds, to me at least, more like a judgment on the people than on what's being sold. So if I say Geauga Lake is the poor man's Cedar Point, I suggest that the park is attempting, and failing, to be on equal footing with its competitor. If I say Geauga Lake is the poor person's Cedar Point, this says to me that it's where poor people go.
I'm not comfortable with the latter, both because I don't intend to pass judgment on people living at or below the poverty line and because it probably reflects reality. If an Ohio family living with limited means wanted to visit an amusement park, they may have no choice but to go to the cheaper one. In American English, if we wanted to say that poor people would choose Geauga Lake, we'd refer not to the patrons, but instead the park, calling it something like "a budget amusement park." It's the same with the word luxury — the emphasis is on the product, not the clientele.
In the case of poor man's, I argue that its staying power is primarily in its deeper meaning as an idiom, far less so because women may be remiss to assign equal opportunity to a term suggesting poverty. As was the case with many gendered terms, the alternative has to sound appealing before it will catch on ("fire person," for example, rather unfortunately sounds like a person made of fire). "Poor person's" is not the platform on which to launch a campaign for this term. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if the words of this idiom do evolve into something that eschews the word man.