I just discovered (from an interesting piece by Andrei Gavrilov on the recently-deceased American pianist Van Cliburn, winner of the first Tchaikovsky prize in Moscow in 1958) that the Soviet term for people was “human material”.
Thinking about it, I’m not at all sure that it’s any more ghastly than the current Western term (originating from the land of the free), “human resources” (or even just HR).
Both seem to me to de-humanise us, reducing us to featureless commodities.
What on earth was wrong with the previous descriptor, personnel?
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