Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26662104-20160221035712/@comment-27701762-20160221080747

Did a quick check to confirm: the terms "man," "woman," and "person" are used by other monsters throughout the game. Not frequently, but they certainly do it. This includes:

- Muffet in battle - "The person who warned us about you..."

- Undyne's hangout, upon selecting sugar to drink - "What do I look like, the ice cream woman?"

- Toriel, after flirting over the phone - "You can certainly find better than an old woman like me."

- Burgerpants, "Catty's Invitation" dialogue - "You've brought a tear to the eye of this old man."

Emphasizing the terms "man," "woman," or "person" and restricting those to humans is natural, but probably isn't helpful when dealing with Undertale. If we remove these terms from the lexicon in the game, then we need a new set of terms ("monster" would be able to stand in for "person," but that only serves a third of the problem), which is more likely to make things confusing by adding jargon. Additionally, using these terms in place of new, monster-based terms helps to establish the connection between the player and the monsters. So Toby has incentives to stick with these terms, either out of laziness or cementing the narration. Or we could posit that Toby made a mistake and meant to remove these terms, but then we couldn't use the River Person's self-description as evidence.