Hi, Ardith Hinton!
I read your message from 12.11.2022 22:40

  AH>>  Gloom = a state of partial or total darkness.
  ak>>  Well... So an Englishman can see in the gloom
  ak>>  and can not see in the gloom.  ;-)
  AH>            I see you got the idea.  Good....  :-)
  AH>            I added the correction just before posting my reply,
  AH> then began to wonder if I should have said simply "-man",
  AH> "-men".  This pattern is akin to what dictionaries use, builds
  AH> on what you & others here already know, and is easier to read.
  AH> OTOH I wouldn't want anyone to read too much into it.            Man,
  AH> men.  Woman, women.  The same applies to "Englishman" & other words
  AH> you've probably encountered before.  But times change, and where folks
  AH> like me grew up hearing of policemen & policewomen many such terms
  AH> have been replaced by gender-neutral terms... WRT this example, 
"police
  AH> officer".  :-)

So it would have been proper to ask "Can an English person see in the 
gloom?" Does it sound well?


Bye, Ardith!
Alexander Koryagin
fido.english_tutor,local.cc.ak 2022
--- Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.7.0