If Not “Human Being”… Then What?

We rarely question the names we inherit.

They feel as natural as breath, as fixed as the ground beneath our feet. We repeat them without thought. Pass them to our children. Write them into our laws and stories as if they’ve always been here.

But words are not neutral.

They are vessels — shaped by the hands of those who came before us. Filled with the meanings they chose. The silences they left. The exclusions they normalized so deeply we stop noticing them.

Take “human being.”

It sounds ancient. Timeless. Surely we’ve always called ourselves this.

But in English, the phrase is surprisingly young — the earliest known use dates to 1694.

Before then, “human” was almost always an adjective: human nature, human form.

We named ourselves “man” or “person.”

Attaching “being” to “human” fused “earth-born” with the idea of a living creature. But the roots didn’t change. Latin humanus, from homo (man, person) and humus (earth, ground).

The “earth-born man.”

And here’s the quiet violence: the so-called “generic male” has always been anything but neutral.

Woman disappears.

Not because she was absent from life, but because the language did not imagine her as central enough to name.

And it still doesn’t.

Look around. The “generic male” lives on in the words we choose, the research we fund, the histories we teach, the laws we write. It’s why crash test dummies are still most often designed on the proportions of an average man — making women more likely to be injured in a car accident. It’s why voice recognition software is more accurate for male voices. Why medical studies still default to male bodies as the norm, even for conditions that affect women differently.

If a name leaves someone out, systems tend to leave them out too.

Language sets the frame for what is possible.

If the frame is too small, whole lives get cropped out.

And it’s not only gender.

The history of the word “human” sits alongside a lineage — ongoing, not closed — where entire peoples are treated as less than human. Indigenous nations, Africans in the slave trade, the colonized across the globe.

This didn’t stop with abolition or independence ceremonies. It continues in who gets granted asylum, whose deaths make the news, who is believed when they speak. Sometimes the word “man” is still explicitly withheld. Other times it’s narrowed to mean only a certain kind of man.

We still live with the narrowing. We still speak it into existence every day.

Yet beyond the reach of empire, other truths have always endured.

In ancient Kemet (Egypt), Hu was not “man” at all, but the god-principle of the authoritative utterance — the creative sound that calls worlds into being.

In Sufi mysticism, “Hu” is the sacred breath of the Divine.

These are not empty syllables.

They are the vibration of creation itself.

If Hu is voice and spirit, then humus — the earth — is the womb. Dark. Fertile. Patient. The place where seeds rest and listen before they rise.

In this telling, the masculine speaks, the feminine receives, and life emerges — not in hierarchy, not in subset, but in circle.

But that story didn’t make it into the language we use today.

Instead, we inherited a naming still shaped by conquest — one that preserves the words that fit its architecture and allows others to be ignored.

This is why naming matters.

When we live inside a word that was never meant to include all of us, we unconsciously live inside its limits.

We inherit not only the label, but the worldview it encodes.

We forget that we are more than what the word can hold.

We forget the parts of us the word erased.

So I ask:

What might change if we named ourselves differently?

What if our word for who we are held the whole of us — the breath and the body, the spirit and the soil, the feminine and the masculine, the mortal and the eternal?

We could be Earthborns — to remember our shared origin.

We could be Children of the Womb — to honour the generative source.

We could be Breathwalkers — to remember that life is a conversation between matter and spirit.

We could be Kin of the Soil — to restore relationship, not dominion.

We could be Voice of the Earth — to remember that our speaking shapes the world.

We could be Mortal Beings — to hold the truth that we are finite in body, infinite in essence, and that this shared impermanence makes us kin.

Because the words we use to name ourselves are not just labels.

They are mirrors.

And if the mirror is cracked, our reflection will always be incomplete.

It is time to name ourselves whole.

And perhaps the first step is this —

to stop mistaking the name we were given for the truth of who we are.