The traveling saleshuman

As part of the homework for the course I was TAing this summer I assigned an algorithm related to the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The students were asked to implement a relatively simple algorithm that computes a 2-approximation of the solution to an instance of the TSP1. I was dissapointed, although not surprised, when I started receiving questions from students about the Traveling Salesperson Problem via email. I don't know if their textbook used this ridiculous renaming of the problem, or if the students themselves have been sufficiently indoctrinated with Political Correctness that they couldn't bring themselves to type the word "salesman", but either way it made me want to cry. It's one thing to use somewhat different terms (e.g. chair instead of chairman) to avoid the appearance of bias in the world of oversensitive paranoia like politics or business, but it's quite another to make up idiotic words whose only purpose is to annoy people and to show how diversity-sensitive you are. Never mind that the word man was originally gender neutral, the words wer and wyf were used to refer to male humans and female humans respectively2. Which means that words like mankind aren't used to refer to the human race because of patriarchical opression, but because that is the actual meaning of the word. Why should we throw away perfectly good words because of fanatic uninformed revisionism? It would be equally valid, and much simpler, to realize that the word "man" can be gender neutral, and has been historically, rather than to try to eliminate every single word like mailman or man-made with "modern" words like letter carrier. People could just realize that the history of male dominance in society does not mean that the gender neutral meaning of the word man has been abolished, and then get on with their lives. This reminds me of a pamphlet on political correctness that was given out by the Operations Research and Industrial Engineering department at Cornell to their TAs. It had numerous examples of phrases that were considered insensitive. One of these was the idiom "black sheep". Yes, you read that right. Apparently the phrase "black sheep" is now racist. Give me a break. 1. The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) can be stated as follows. Given a set of vertices (i.e. cities) and a set of edges (i.e. roads) connecting them, where each edge has a certain weight (i.e. distance to travel), what is the order in which the vertices should be visited so that every vertex is visited, and the sum of the weights of the edges used is minimized? A 2-approximation for this problem is a visit order that is guaranteed to have a weight within a factor of two of the weight of the optimal order.