I can’t see the point anyway, I think if you’re getting hung up on the word “man” in things then you truly fail at seeing the etymological history of the words (something I’ve had an argument with in the office as someone disagreed with the convention “dear Sirs”).
As per the gospel of Wikipedia:
The spelling of “woman” in English has progressed over the past millennium from wīfmann[6] to wīmmann to wumman , and finally, the modern spelling woman .[7] In Old English, wīfmann meant ‘woman’ (literally ‘woman-person’), whereas wermann meant ‘man’. Mann had a gender-neutral meaning of ‘human’, corresponding to Modern English ‘person’ or ‘someone’; however, subsequent to the Norman Conquest, man began to be used more in reference to ‘male human’, and by the late 13th century it had begun to eclipse usage of the older term wer.[8] The medial labial consonants f and m in wīfmann coalesced into the modern form “woman”, while the initial element wīf, which had also meant ‘woman’, underwent semantic narrowing to the sense of a married woman (‘wife’).
To be honest, “sirs, ma’ams, et al” (often with inappropriate apostrophes) has always gripped me.
Sir is the singular of gentlemen. Madam is the singular of ladies.
You wouldn’t expect the front of house at your favourite fancy resto to say good evening sirs and madams. You’d expect them to use ladies and gentlemen, and the singular if appropriate when you’re on your annual date night.
The military can’t handle it because they’ve allowed the idea that calling a group of your seniors “gentlemen” is casual to take root. Just because many use it that way today, doesn’t automatically make it so. Nor, more importantly, does it make “sirs” correct.
Gopping.
I am, of course, always ready to be persuaded otherwise. Just setting my stall out!
Commercially it’s referred to as a ‘flight deck’ by most companies. But any manuals still refer to it as a ‘cockpit’. Most passengers still just call it the cockpit, because that’s what it is.
Same way we don’t call clocks ‘timepieces’ because it has the letters from cock scrambled in into it.
The origin of word is, obviously, nothing to do with gentlemen’s vegetables. It’s from the nautical term for where the coxswain would be.
Actuation takes most of its terminology from the nautical world - think Pan Am’s Clippers, the uniforms etc.
