If we are renaming things from the past to quell the moderns, it should be renamed Traveling Seller since it rolls off the tongue so much better.
It is generally appropriate, and increasingly preferred in many contexts, but not yet generally considered the only acceptable thing. (E.g., "actress" is almost never considered wrong.)
But consider that we used to have the word "doctoress" to refer to a female doctor. Using that feels weird.
(Alternatively: then why don't we have separate words for black actors, white actors, native American actors, south-east Asian actors, transgender actors, and so on?)
And we are talking about human language here, it's something that has evolved over centuries, to a large extent spontaneously. That's why we make some distinctions and not others that may seem equally important.
If we were talking about a programming language your argument be more relevant, although I would still argue that sex is a much more dramatic difference than race.
Sort of like "model". Most of the time you just say "model" and it could be either sex, but if you want to talk specifically about male models you say that.
This level of specificity probably only works for media in which there’s only one main female character.
For an even weirder example, see ‘priestess’. No-one ever refers to modern female priests as priestesses, but historians often refer to, say, female priests in Ancient Rome as priestesses. On the other hand, historians never use the term ‘doctress’ for archaic female doctors.
“Solution of a Large-Scale Traveling-Salesman Problem“
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.606...
Currently Google scholar shows ‘salesman’ with an order of magnitude more references than ‘salesperson’
My only point is that if we are going to fork the reference, we should use something that is easier to say. (I honestly don’t care if we fork the reference :) ).
Maybe it has an effect on behavior? I’m not sure of any research behind gendered language.
It's called the Sapir-Worff hypothesis. Pinker called it something like "the most well known hypothesis in linguistics, too bad it's almost certainly false." It's pre-Chomsky, in date and concept.
Nah, if it's offensive to me and you're trying to convince me of something or sell to me, it's clearly your problem.