word choice - "Chair" or "chairman?"


Is it right to use chair, but not chairman in this example?



He served as the Department Chair from 1995 to 1999.




Answer



Traditionally the word chairman was used irrespective of whether the incumbent was a man or a woman. But over the last few decades many people have tried to avoid words which include the morpheme man because they are seen as excluding women.


Two of the solutions which have been applied to chairman are chairperson and chair. Both are now in wide use, probably chair more commonly.


There are a few people who object to either of these uses: probably the only way to express it that will not upset anybody is to avoid the noun altogether:



He chaired the Department from 1995 to 1999



Edit


As jgbelacqua has pointed out, in the academic world the word chair existed as a post (professorship) long before the concerns I mentioned above. To refer to the holder of a chair as the Chair is simple metonymy, and well-established. This is different from outside academia, where chair did not exist in this sense, and so the use for a person came in as a neologism which some find awkward.


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