You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
Nina is looking for a book that sounds HOLY CRAP INTERESTING.
I would like to find a book I read at least 25
years ago. It was a historical set in England, maybe in the Regency or
Victorian period. It featured a young lady who for some reason has to seek
employment. She’s not working class, but a well-educated girl whose family
has perhaps fallen on hard times. Anyway, she ends up becoming a companion
to an older woman out in the country, I think. (I’m hazy on some of the
details.)The lady who hired her is very kind, and one afternoon this girl comes
across someone she thinks is a child up to mischief. She sees him from the
back and says something like “Oh you naughty boy!” Well, when the
“child” turns, he’s actually a man. A little person, who is the
employer’s son. The girl’s all embarrassed, but as the story progresses
she and the man fall in love. The man has lived a lonely life due to his
size and has absorbed himself in a hobby—astronomy, if I remember rightly.They end up getting married, and it’s not an “in name only” relationship,
because they have a baby. The middle was the best part of the story because
of the unusual romance. Unfortunately, I guess according to romance tropes
that declare all romance heroes must be tall dark and handsome, her husband
dies. She’s heartbroken, but goes on to find love again with a new guy, Mr.
TDandH. He’s a lord or something.The story was kind of blah after her first husband died, but I did enjoy it and would like to read it again to
see if I’d enjoy as much the second time around. Not sure if I could even
get hold of it after all this time, but at least I’d like to know the
author and title. Can anyone help?
I don’t think I’ve heard of a little person hero or heroine. Or Heroine’s First Husband. Anyone remember this book?
I have consistently advocated respecting the feelings of others. If you told me you did not wish to be referred to as ‘black’, I would most certainly respect your wishes, and would ask what term you preferred. (What term is currently preferred by those who reject ‘black’ by the way?)
The problem is that it is so often necessary to refer to people whom one does not know personally and whose opinions cannot therefore be solicited. In such cases, because there is now no universal agreement on these matters, one runs the risk of offending some of them completely inadvertently. This really is a hiding to nothing: there is no satisfactory process when the rules are constantly changing.
Personally, I try not to take offence when none is intended. To do so simply makes everyone concerned indignant and miserable. It is a very hostile and hurtful act to accuse someone falsely, and to blame a person for being insulting when their fault was the result of ignorance rather than intent is unjust, and in itself a very aggressive act. The perceived fault must be addressed, of course, but just as the ‘offender’ should respect the feelings of the ‘offended’, the converse also applies.
Great! Unfortunately I do, and what I was trying to say in my original remark is that Australian men at their *worst* are all the things I mentioned. Of course, at their *best*, they’re not like that. I live in Queensland in a typical working class suburb. Sadly we live right next to people such as I describe, and our local papers are filled with the blatherings of people with identical attitudes. Having lived in the UK for a long time, I’m not unaware that many countries produce men (and people) with unattractive attributes. The difference here is that being a ‘larrikin’, or even being obnoxiously bigoted (a la Andrew Bolt), is elevated to an ideal. The ‘Aussie bloke’, ‘true blue’ etc. Don’t tell me you’re unaware of *them*.
Anyway, you don’t know any Aussie men who are racist, sexist arrogant arseholes, and I know dozens. So let’s chalk it up to different life experiences, okay?
THis is patently not true because it was black bloggers and writers from whom I learned to use the term “People of Colour”. “Colored” is different from “PoC” because the former belongs to apartheid/Jim Crow and was *imposed*, the latter is a term that certain groups use for themselves. An indigenous Canadian told me she personally objected to PoC, so I don’t use it around her, but as you’ve seen above, using ‘Black’ around others causes offence. I try to use terms that people use for themselves – so with Shem having said she prefers ‘dwarf’, I would use that for her, and for other people I would use what they use, or failing that, what the main support organisations use for their group.
I mainly try very hard to use terms like ‘non-white’ because it assumes white is the default (in fact whites are the minority in the world). I could have said ‘brown people’ but then that erases the pride of many black Americans in their own identity and African heritage.
My real point is that tinyninja blithely writes off the right of *everyone* to self-describe, and to be called what *they* wish to be called. She wants to use whatever words *she* feels comfortable with, regardless of the discomfort it causes other people.
No, it really doesn’t. If someone innocently uses a term which causes offence, they have the right to apologise, and not be seen as automatically evil. If they keep doing it…then no. Tolerating bigotry is not a sign of an open mind.
I have no doubt in my mind at all that tinyninja knew exactly what she was doing by throwing out deliberately inflammatory comments, and she’s the only one I’ve caled out for doing so. I’ve only picked on you for trying to tell me what Aussie men are like when I’m actually an Aussie.
Anyway, this is all way off-topic. I would love to see more romances with diverse heroes and heroines (or heroes with heroes since I prefer m/m.) Any recs?
Hi! I’m the one who sent out the HaBO request. This has been a very interesting discussion! I’m tempted to say the book is not “Lady Jane”, because I don’t remember anything about a rape or attempted rape, but as I said it has been many years since I read the book. I’ll check out the suggested title, but if anybody comes up with any more ideas, please keep posting! Thanks!
Hmm. I’m starting to think “Lady Jane” is NOT the book, because I’m almost positive it was not a Fawcett regency. I remember some of those quite fondly. Especiallly the ones by Janet Louise Roberts. I loved “Star Sapphire” which she wrote under a pseudonym—still have that one. The heroine was Jewish and married a gentile hero. That was quite a sweet book.
I’ll check out “Lady Jane”, though, just in case…
@AgTigress
I actually think it varies from person to person. Like how my mom’s best friend will get extremely angry if you call her “African American” and prefers the term “black.”
All I know is Matt Rolloft of Little People, Big World often used the term “dwarf” on the show to describe himself and his wife and son.
Shoot, too late to edit what I was going to say and forgot –
“African American” is what I’ve been told constantly by teachers and the media to call anyone who’s black that lives in America. Even if their ancestry isn’t from Africa. Nevermind that people like Avery Brooks and Whoopi Goldberg have spoken out against the term. If I dare say “black” I’m told I’m a racist and no better than a member of the KKK – 99.9% of the time by a white person.
That’s why I don’t like PC-ness. It seems to me that groups that have nothing to do with the people we’re trying not to offend are setting the rules. Like how people who are not Jewish say that people can’t say “Merry Christmas” because it might offend someone who’s Jewish. Which is usually when I point them to Ben Stein’s website. Especially this page –
http://www.benstein.com/121805xmas.html
I prefer to be called Miss, not Ms. I like being a woman, not a womyn. I’d rather be called fat then “goddess/queen/diva-sized” or “curvy.” If I worked on an airline I’d call myself a stewardess, not a flight attendant. I’d rather be an actress than an actor. I enjoy the names that seperate me from being a man because being a woman is something special and when you try to change the spelling or make titles gender neutral, that, to me, disminishes my specialiness as a woman.
How come no one bothers to ask people what they want to be called? How come people decide for them?
Anyway, it’s kind of weird this book came up because I was trying to remember a movie I only saw part of so I could add it to my Netflix. I only saw one scene but in it a woman offered her new neighbor – who was a little person/dwarf/whatever the PC Police say it’s okay for me to call my fellow human beings – a ride home and even though he took it he was really nasty to her because he thought she was judging him on his size.
Just dropping back to comment on Game of Thrones again:
Yes, this was the problem. I read the first one shortly after release. Wasn’t a long wait for the second. Now the gaps between are getting progressively longer and I’m getting progressively angrier about it. Don’t get me wrong, I actually liked the series, but I’m now convinced that he’s going to pull a Robert Jordan on me and die before finishing it.
Ann Somerville has said very eloquently most of what I was thinking on this thread, but I’ll just chime in with an Ursula K. Le Guin reference for any fantasy lovers here that “the name is the thing, and the true name is the true thing.” Whether one considers this particular vision of magic (present in lots of fantasy novels, including Andre Norton’s and others) a rip-off of Plato or an echo of the biblical naming of the animals by Adam it seems indisputable that our culture associates the act of naming something with taking some kind of power or possession over it. (Perhaps many cultures do this? AgTigress may be able to speak to this point?) So it follows that people wish to select their OWN self-identifying labels, because having others select them is giving them a measure of power, even if in our mundane world we don’t practice magic.
I’m not that sympathetic to the argument that it’s inconvenient/inconsistent/awkward to keep changing the accepted labels. We change the way we address people all the time. How many of us would complain that it’s hard to remember the name of a friend or colleague who changed her (or his) name upon marriage? Or refuse to use the full form of someone’s given name as an adult when we knew them by a nickname in childhood? Just because you knew a 25 year old who introduces himself as “Michael” when he was a 5 year old named “Mikey” doesn’t necessarily mean that you have the right to address/refer to him as “Mikey” in social or work situations where others know him as “Michael.” Even if it’s intended as a term of affection, you’d stop using it if he let you know that he found it embarrassing, right? So different people make different choices about personal names, and different choices about how they choose to be known as a group in different times and places, and others respect that. I don’t see how it’s a problem, or why that’s “offensive” to people of good intentions.
A specific caveat about race; I can understand older people being uncomfortable using currently accepted terms that were once offensive. I knew a Spaniard of the war generation who was an ardent Franco supporter (I’m deliberately avoiding the loaded term “fascist” descriptive and accurate as it might be, because he was a charming gentleman), who referred to me as “hebrea” (Hebrew) because he was so positive that “judio” (Jew) was an insult. Another Spaniard of the same generation but considerably more left-wing was willing to use “judio” but absolutely refused to say “marrano” (a forced convert by the Inquisition) even in a historical context discussing the fifteenth century, because he thought it was so offensive. He used the term “cripto-judio” (secret Jew) even though scholarly works have been published by Jewish scholars using the word “marrano.” I respected their feelings about these words even though I was a little uncomfortable being called a “Hebrew,” because they were clearly trying to AVOID giving offense, not merely REFLEXIVELY using the formerly accepted term on the grounds that it had been accepted once.
I’m probably beating a dead horse here, so I’ll just head back in the general direction of the original topic and say that for those who are interested in books which feature dwarves/little people as characters, Geoffrey Trease has two YA historical novels MANDEVILLE and SARABANDE FOR SHADOWS which feature a dwarf violinist (not as a romantic lead, but as an important character). A historical note to MANDEVILLE mentions that the character was based on an actual member of Charles I’s court.
Thanks for the book recommendations.
I’ve gotten that impression (from historical romances) that back in the day it used to be considered rude to comment on personal appearance, and it strikes me as a lovely etiquette guideline. If I never heard another evaluation of my physical appearance again I’d be ok. Even if it’s someone gushing compliments, I’d just as soon not be judged, and if I’m going to be, I’d rather be complimented (or not) on something I can control.
I try a)to assume that no one wishes to be offensive b)not to talk about appearance at all unless it’s strictly relevant c)to use the most widely accepted terminology and d)to make for individuals whatever adjustments they request. C is the stickiest of those, as acceptable use changes over time and varies by region.
I don’t think there is any terminology that isn’t offensive to someone, or that can’t be used offensively, which does make it difficult to have an informed discussion about it. One of the goals of political correctness was to give people that acceptable terminology, but alas there has been a lack of wide-spread agreement. As a result people have gotten fed up with the very concept, which is a shame.
Used to be ‘negro’ was the polite, progressive term, tho it’s now pretty universally reviled. Colored, black, african, and african-american all have advocates, and yet they are each offensive to a substantial sub-set of the population they describe (or don’t actually). All wildly exacerbated by ‘purity’ issues, and undermined by the fact that race as commonly used for humans is an artificial construct with no scientific reality – and yet it plays such a major role in our lives that for all purposes it exists anyway, and that inherent subjectivity of course complicates nomenclature further.
Anyway, I think the goal is not to alienate people further.
I’m looking forward to finding out if this is the book – I love the idea that there could be more than 1 book with this description.
I’d like to backtrack to raise a question of scholarship:
Tinyninja stated some distance upstream that “man”, linguistically speaking, derived from “manos”, a term meaning “hand”. Ann Somerville responded by describing that statement as misinformation (and later, as “deliberately false etymology”), and gave a link to an alternate derivation. I have a handful of questions about this:
First, I’d be interested in pointers to formal reference works arguing both sides of the “man/manos” claim, as this is a clear point of disagreement for which we don’t presently have any external datapoints, and without such pointers I am extremely reluctant to form a conclusion on the merits of such a sharply characterized claim.
Second, I am puzzled in one respect by the response. It’s clear that Ms. Somerville disagrees with Tinyninja as to the “man/manos” derivation. But if I read the dictionary references to which she links correctly, both that dictionary’s discussion of “woman” and its discussion of “man” agree with Tinyninja’s underlying assumption—that is, that “man” in its early derivations was often used as a descriptor for the human species in general and understood as such, and therefore that “man” is not an inherently sexist term. (Or at least that it wasn’t one until the modern feminist movement chose to interpret it as such.) Thus, for example, the classic King James Biblical verse: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” was, when originally transliterated, meant to take in male and female alike.
Again, I’m attempting to focus specifically on the linguistic questions, not the problems involving socially acceptable modern usage. (I have opinions on those, too, but this comment is long enough already.)
Since tinyninja didn’t even get the spelling right in her mistaken claim, I will help you out here – it’s ‘manus’ not ‘manos’. Use that to Google. Then you can find links like:
http://diemperdidi.info/language/chair/
Certainly, ‘man’ has a long history as being used as a synonym for ‘humanity’ – which is a much better word to use. But though no one actually sat down and thought, “hey, let’s use a term which excludes 50% of the population”, the fact remains that its use springs from the assumption of the Bible, English Common law and many other precedents, that only men were full people. Women and children were chattels, little better in status than slaves, and with as few rights. We no longer believe that (officially – in practice, women and children are still too often treated as less than full humans). So why use a term which reinforces assumptions about half the human race which we no longer accept?
And before you say, “Oh, but it doesn’t matter because it’s just what we’re used to, and everyone knows that ‘man’ means everyone”, try this thought experiment. Imagine picking up Darwin’s “The Descent of Woman”. Imagine listing to Hamlet say “Oh what a piece of work is woman!” Would you cringe if someone said Donne had written “No woman is an island, alone unto herself”? Very likely. You would feel uncomfortable, unsettled. The world order which accepts you by default, is suddenly challenged. You are no longer the centre of things.
And that’s how it feels to be a woman a lot of the time. I cringe whenever someone now uses ‘man’ to mean humanity – why do they *need* to? We don’t talk about female firemen, or refer to (in Britain at least) female police officers as “WPCs” any more. We have perfectly good, non-hurtful and more accurate terms to use – so why not use them and stop reinforcing bad logic and bad attitudes.
This link gives a concise explanation:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/608/05/
Now, John, please don’t come back with some reference to ‘feminazis” or pretend that your rights as a human are affected if you’re encouraged to use inclusive language. History is not always a good reason to do something. Just because at one time it was acceptable to use ‘cripple’ and ‘n*gger’ doesn’t mean times haven’t changed. ‘Man’ for humanity isn’t up there with that level of offence, but really, I hope intelligent, sensitive people have moved on. Language changes, and so does society.
Speaking of dwarfish heroes (and Australian ones to boot): Ruth Park’s award winning 1977 novel Swords and Crowns and Rings.
Plus, it has one of my favourite synopses of all time: “Growing up in an Australian country town before World War I, Jackie Hanna and Cushie Moy are carefree and innocent in their love for each other. But Jackie is a dwarf, and his devotion to the beautiful Cushie is condemned by her parents. This is the story of their life-long odyssey, and of the triumph of a special kind of courage.”
Exactly. I find it sad that anyone here would assume that anyone else here deliberately wishes to upset and offend their fellow-humans. Surely most of us want to get one comfortably with others, and try to adapt our behaviour when required. The complaint that I have about politically-correct terminology is that changes over time and space have made it very difficult indeed not to make some mistakes.
A minor example is the apparent promotion in some circles of ‘African-American’ as a more acceptable term than ‘black’. That’s usually pretty irrelevant in Britain and Europe. Most of the black people I meet are Caribbean or African (Nigerian, Ghanaian, etc.); there were probably more black Americans here in the 1940s than there are now!
Yep, and back in the day of the 1950s as much as the 1820s! As a child, I was taught that it was rude to make ‘personal remarks’, which covered more than physical appearance.
Just for the record, here is one online etymology for the word man (from dictionary.com):
I think the Latin manus (hand) is a complete red herring, being, for one thing, much too late. The presumed proto-Indo-European root *man- already referred to a whole person.
Note from the word-history that the sense ‘adult male’ does not appear till early Middle English, the OE sense obviously encompassing both sexes, and that the whole process had already occurred in late Latin, with homo swallowing up vir. The point about words for ‘adult male human’ and ‘adult female human’ sometimes narrowing down to the meanings ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ is also relevant, and occurs in a number of European languages.
It would be interesting to hear from any qualified philologist who may be reading this. I have no doubt that a great deal of ink has already been spilt on the topic, but as one gets more deeply into any subject, many apparent certainties fade away. As, for example, the differences between ‘black’ and ‘white’: if you go back far enough, we are all ‘African – something’, since that continent is the cradle of the whole species.
Thanks to AgTigress for the linguistic analysis. Ann, your links provide solid guidance on modern inclusive writing, but not on the linguistic issues I asked about, and these are two distinct issues. I agree that in modern writing, there are good inclusive choices for most gender-related usages. As others have noted, ethnic and medically-related descriptors can be trickier.
However, I come from a family of historians and literature buffs, and I have a very strong bias against rewriting the past in an effort to make it more palatable to modern ears—especially when the perceived bias is not necessarily part of the original writer’s intent. I do cringe at your recastings of Shakespeare and Donne, but I do so for three wholly independent reasons. First, I don’t see explicit gender bias in the original texts. Second, those recastings fail as poetry; they do not scan and the replacement disrupts the aural flow of the surrounding text. Third, they impose shades of meaning on the original texts in a way that the original authors almost certainly did not intend. As for Darwin, that example is merely silly, as The Descent of Man is a scholarly work, quite explicitly using the word in its scientific sense as a synonym for homo sapiens.
Now there’s room for debate on some of these points, on a case-by-case basis. But with respect to well-established texts, I think it’s unethical at the least to re-edit those texts in a way that masks or diminishes the writer’s original work, and it doesn’t help that many modern editors make poetic hash when they try. The New Century Hymnal, published in 1995 by the United Church of Christ, is a brilliant demonstration of how to ruin good poetry, and I was among those appalled by the recent kerfuffle wherein a re-edited version of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn removed the words “nigger” and “Injun”. In my own writing and social interaction, I will certainly do my best to use language respectfully. But I will not change another writer’s words in a way that alters the context or character of the work in which they appear.
John, I can only shout ‘hear, hear!’ as loudly as possible! I am a professional historian too (of a specialised type, namely archaeology), and to me it is axiomatic that one should never tamper with the evidence. The past was not perfect, and nor is the present. It is necessary to understand and accept the imperfections without flinching.
As I have said (about 14 times by now) I am wholly in favour of treating everyone with all possible courtesy and trying to meet their preferences about forms of address and descriptions, but it is simply an unequivocal fact at the moment that continual change over both time and region makes it almost impossible to avoid the occasional inadvertent ‘offence’. I am far too old to get genuinely worked up about this stuff any more, but I do get a sneaky feeling of satisfaction when some of the strident voices for political correctness occasionally fall foul of their own rules, because they are not quite au fait with all the current fads!
As a female scholar entering on my career in the early 1960s, I benefited considerably from many of the changes, subtle and not-so-subtle, brought about by feminist thinking, and I shall always be grateful for that. Amongst other things, it was actually feminist perspectives that made it acceptable for writers of both sexes to personalise their opinions in academic writing, to say, ‘I think that this hypothesis best explains the evidence’ rather than the pseudo-objective, ‘the evidence is best explained by this hypothesis’. The cultural preconceptions of the author, including his or her nationality, age and sex, are now accepted as relevant parts of the evidence when interpretations are put forward.
Yet at the same time, as someone with a keen, though amateur, interest in language, I do get irritated and bored by some of the more piffling little issues around gendered language. I have been Chairman of a good many committees in my time, and always preferred the traditional ‘Chairman’ as a form of address to ‘Chairwoman’ (let alone the ugly word ‘chairperson’), because really, a person’s sex has nothing whatever to do with his or her ability to chair a meeting. It simply isn’t relevant. Nobody ever tried referring to me as a ‘chair’, but they’d have got a flea in their ear if they had. I am not a piece of furniture.
Sorry, straying way off the subject. 🙂
AgTigress- thanks for pointing out that “man” has nothing to do with “manos”. The English words “man” and “woman” have their roots in
OE and are germanic rather than latinate in origin. Interestingly, (to me at least, as a person with a background in linguistics) OE had grammatical gender and there were three words for “woman” that were each a different gender: wifmann (m), cwen (f), and wif (n). “Woman” is derived from the “wifmann.” One interesting aspect of this in light of the discussion of whether it is acceptable to refer to both women and men with words like mankind is that even in late OE there was already some tendency to prefer agreement based on natural rather than grammatical gender, and of course in ModE only natural gender is used. Given that we now have only natural gender in English, it makes sense that it seems nonsensical to some to use masculine words such as “man” to refer to both genders.
Not every person of short stature who owes their stature to a growth syndrome or other medical/developmental occurrence has one of the growth syndromes medically described as “dwarfism”.
I think people who have been diagnosed with one of the syndromes that includes “dwarfism” in its name tend to self-identify with the term “dwarf” more than people whose short stature is the result of other medical and developmental occurrences; I know people in the latter category who will firmly correct anyone who refers to them as a “dwarf”, as they don’t feel it’s an accurate reflection of their experience.
“Midget”, though, is not accurate or appropriate in most contexts—-it used to be used specifically as a way of distinguishing (and providing hierarchical value to) those people of short stature who did not have achondroplasic dwarfism, so referring to all people of short stature as “midgets” is inaccurate (as people with achondroplasia are a significant majority in that group) and offensive to those who remember the days in which “midgets” were celebrated to the detriment of “dwarfs”.
Cora, thank you for the additional linguistic insights. I think the matter of biological sex as opposed to grammatical gender does have some relevance here: speakers of modern English are unthinkingly accustomed to equating sex and gender (even to the extent of often misusing the word gender as a euphemism for sex, which is extremely bad practice).
Native speakers of the many languages, like French, in which all nouns have either masculine or feminine gender, and even more so, German, in which nouns may be masculine, feminine or neuter, but where those genders do not necessarily align with the two sexes of living animals or the sexlessness of inanimate objects, must find it much easier to detach the grammatical identity and classification of a word from any link with sex. English-speakers can usually just about cope with die Sonne being feminine and der Mond masculine (even though opposite to the case in many other languages!) but often get all weird about diminutives like das Mädchen being neuter, because they refer to a female person. I know there are other languages in which there are more than three grammatical genders, and the definitions must draw away even further from the simplistic male=masculine, female=feminine, inanimate=neuter concept that seems so natural and self-evident to English-speakers.
That’s because I provided the information you were after – which AgTIgress cut and pasted – in my first link in my very first comment.
So have I. And at no point have I suggested that, but you already know that. You’re misdirecting. I asked you to carry out a thought experiment to challenge your biases, and you used it to reinforce yor biases.
Well no. You probably don’t. You don’t want to.
Missing the point, quite deliberately I suspect.
No, really? Gosh, I would never have realised that. I mean, I’m only someone with qualifications in history *and* science, who has done scholarly research on one of Darwin’s frequen correspondents, someone whose reputation has become inextricably bound up with Darwin. That couldn’t possibly be why that example came to me in the first place, could it? If I didn’t know exactly what Darwin was talking about, I could always just go to my copy of Descent of Man on our shelves and check.
Neither will I, except for the apparently pointless exercise in trying to make someone challenge their entrenched modes of thought.
I should have known better than to respond to you, but as a scientist, I can’t help but test theories rather than blindly accept them. I theorised that you were likely to be the kind of man who usually engages in discussions touching on feminist issues in any way, given this original remark:
But I thought I should at least test the theory in case I was working from a false premise. Therefore I engaged you in good faith, allowing you ample opportunities for you to demonstrate the same. Instead you respond with a bunch of irrelevant, condescending piffle ignoring all my points and falling back on a well-worn call to historical authority, which – if you really are a historian – you would know is specious, since historians, and indeed authors, are products of their time, not voices for all ages.
However, I know what I’m dealing with now for certain and won’t bother to repeat the effort.
AgTigress, I’d formed an impression of you being a sensible, intelligent person from previous comments you’d made here. It’s tremendously disappointing to see you are so blind to privilege and so supportive of exclusivity in language. By the way, you might look up ‘synecdoche’ before you start putting insects into anyone’s oriface.
And aso by the way, your ‘helpless maiden in need of a champion’, tinyninja hasn’t returned after dumping her little ‘anti-PC’ diatribe. Res ipsa loquitur. If it walks like a troll….
No, that was me in my first comment.
Exactly. Is that so hard to understand? Do we preserve Victorian word usage in the 21st century even though all the evidence shows that English evolves along with society, and society now treats women very differently than it did in Darwin’s day. Usually.
Well, I’m sorry to have disappointed you, but these things happen. You can put my failure to come up to adequate standards of fiery indignation to the frailty of old age, if you like. We all have different priorities when we contemplate the manifold shortcomings and injustices of the world around us, and mine are quite evidently not the same as yours.
I don’t see the relevance of synecdoche (I already know what it means, even without looking it up) to getting a figurative flea in the ear. Perhaps I should avoid idioms, especially any involving orifices, in case somebody takes offence.
I think I’ve said all I need to say on these subjects. There are two brief, specific items in Ann’s lengthy response on which I might touch, but responding to one of them would amount to an inappropriate personal snipe, and responding to the other would amount to repeating myself. Suffice to say that Ann and I appear to disagree strongly, and clearly neither one of is going to change the other’s mind.
I used to work in construction, and when I got promoted I became a foreman, and I have to say I wasn’t thrilled with the word, but forewoman sounded even worse to me, and once I started thinking about it I was always worried that I was going to give my title as foreskin because my brain loves to humiliate me that way. Really, though, none of that mattered to me nearly as much as the fact that as a woman I was still earning less than a man for doing the same job. Which always made me feel that any arguments about the inherent sexism of a word were misdirecting time and energy. If I were going to choose my battles, that one wouldn’t be a priority.
But I do love words. I love the illusion of control that comes from naming things. I think language in attempting to explain the inexplicable is heroic precisely because it is predestined to fail. The evolution of words fascinates me. I don’t think a person would wind up here if they didn’t love words, which seems like good common ground.
When I was studying taxonomy (so I have career commitment issues) my professor told me that there are lumpers and splitters – people who focus on commonalities and people who focus on differences. If you’re trying to win an argument it helps to be a splitter, but less so if you’re trying to convert people to your point of view.
I’m disappointed that this dispute didn’t resolve more amicably, as I think some good points were made by all, and initially it seemed fully plausible that agreement would be reached.
Aargh….I come home late from work and find the discussion has gotten interesting in my absence. In the unlikely event anyone is still reading this….
@John – truly without sniping, I think you misunderstood Ann’s point about Donne and Shakespeare. She wasn’t suggesting rewriting classic works, she was pointing out the fact that their linguistic structure reinforces a specific worldview. I would argue that that is precisely why YOU are correct that “classics” SHOULDN’T be re-written…because be they never so “universal” they are also tied to a specific time and place, and given that their authors were pretty smart people, it’s worth reading their ORIGINAL words, biases and all.
That said, what Ann said was that changing “man” to “woman” in these phrases would make you feel “unsettled” because “woman” is not the default. I think arguing that they don’t scan as poetry is specious, because anyone with Shakespeare or Donne’s facility with language was perfectly capable of coming up with a word that scanned other than “man” (or fitting a multi-syllable word like “woman” into a line – as in “Frailty, thy name is -”).
I would argue that in the context it was written Hamlet’s “what a piece of work is Man” MIGHT well refer ONLY to the male sex. Due to a variety of personal tragedies and neuroses Hamlet the character doesn’t have a very high opinion of women, and he might well be specifically excluding them from his encomium. In fact, three lines later, Hamlet makes it clear that Rosencrantz at least is aware of the bias in his language, when he says “Man delights not me – no, nor woman neither” (emphasis added) The fact that LATER commentators on Shakespeare have airily assumed that by “Man” Shakespeare/Hamlet meant “humanity” does not necessarily mean that this analysis is either correct or historical.
Donne’s “no man is an island” is more problematic. In his secular poetry Donne was perfectly capable of writing about women (in some detail – I remember reading “To His Mistress, Going to Bed” in my last year of high school with the same delighted shock some people recall their first romance novels). In his sacred work, Donne might well have been following the protocol of his time in writing “man” and meaning “people.” BUT (and this is an important but) the fact that he did so merely reflects that such a general social bias existed and that even great geniuses and humanists were not immune from it. To take a slightly frivolous modern example, the later versions of Star Trek have changed the Enterprise’s mission from “boldly going where no man has gone before” to “boldly going where no one has gone before.” The change is minimal, and does not affect scansion. (In fact, since man/one are a slant rhyme, it could even be substituted in a poem with minimal effect on rhyme scheme.) The fact that Star Trek (a famously progressive show) made this change undoubtedly reflects changing mores. The fact that Donne did NOT write “no one” instead of “no man” reflects who he was, and what his society was. We should remember both him and his world as they were, without changing them, but without pretending that things we find unpalatable (such as the fact that women were not fully people under the law) did not exist. Playfully suggesting that “no woman is an island” to call attention to biased language no more dishonors Donne’s original source material than the Seneca Falls Convention’s “Universal Declaration of the Rights of Woman” dishonored the “Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man.” Deliberate satire is not only snark. It is to prove a point.
@AgTigress – I was wondering if anyone would bring up gendered nouns. I don’t have German, but I have studied some Dutch, which is (in this as in so many ways) halfway between German and English; nouns have genders, but in the Netherlands no one remembers what they are anymore, or why there are two definite articles. (As far as I know even older Dutch forms lack a neuter.) Diminutives always take the feminine article “het” and plurals always take the masculine “de.” The suggestion that diminutive nouns automatically become feminine while the universal plural is automatically masculine suggests….something. And perhaps one could argue that it is somehow significant that nouns are taught without gender in the famously liberal Netherlands, while gender remains a grammatical concept in more conservative Flanders. I’m not going to argue that though, because honestly my knowledge isn’t deep enough, and I’m hoping the Dutch speakers on the board chime in to correct any errors I may be making. I will say that the use of gendered nouns in the romance languages has altered (in some cases radically) over the last hundred years, to reflect social realities. One hundred years ago “la alcaldesa” (the mayoress), was the mayor’s wife. Currently, she is the mayor. The same is true of “doctora” (currently the title for a female MD, and formerly the archaic “Mrs. Dr.”) and a host of other titles.
I mentioned Ursula K. Le Guin earlier. I’m going to recommend her again, not her fantasy novels this time, but her excellent essay “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” which appears in her anthology of essays Dancing at the Edge of the World for a thoughtful discussion of how linguistic gender is related to gender as a social construct, and how that in turn is related to (NOT synonymous with) biological sex.
This has become quite the little essay. Pardon me for being long winded. I’m going to close with a completely impertinent question for AgTigress – for a long time reading your screen name I assumed it was a short form of Agnes or similar (and rather associated it with the “Eve of St Agnes,” which would be quite appropriate for romance). Then something reminded me of my long-ago chemistry classes and I hit myself in the forehead and remembered that “Ag” is chemical symbol for silver, and realized that “Silver Tigress” would also be apropos as you have mentioned your age. So, is your screen name a playful reference to “a sable silvered?” Please forgive me for asking a personal question, and feel free to put me in my place. It’s just that I frequently enjoy reading your comments, and I’d like to have a sense of how to mentally pronounce your name. (I’m one of those who “hear” text rather than “seeing” it.)
I can’t do that when I’m not exactly a spring chicken either! 🙂 (Unless I really believe I’m going to live to 98, then I can’t call myself ‘middle-aged’ with any accuracy.)
We are both obviously motivated by a passion for history and accuracy, but all people, and certainly all historians are shaped by our experiences and environment. I have erred in not making sufficient allowance for how your experiences and culture differ from mine, and for that I apologise.
I should have said ‘metonymy’ – the ‘chair’ (the ‘throne’ of command’) is the container and used as a reference for the thing contained, ie. the chairperson/woman/man. I find this acceptable, and would never consider I was being called a piece of furniture. But then I rather like titles like ‘Sparks’ for the ship’s electrian (and sometimes radio operator). I don’t see that kind of thing as an insult.
I apologise for my contribution to any ill-feeling you may bear towards me, and I’m sorry for transferring snark to you that belongs rightly on other heads and other issues.
@kkw: fascinated by the ‘lumpers and splitters’ concept. But I wouldn’t know which camp I occupy, because I seem to enjoy identifying both the classes and the detailed variations in taxonomic exercises.
Your example of being a female foreman and of being paid less than a male counterpart illustrates perfectly my feelings about priorities. I was a Trade Union rep for many years, and some of the situations and cases I dealt with were in my mind when I commented that sometimes the detail of words seem to me less important than other things, even though I would be the first to agree that words matter. Had I been dealing with a case in which a woman was being paid less for her work than a man, I would not waste time and effort demanding that the employer changed her job title (which they might well do readily enough, since it would cost them nothing); I’d keep my powder dry for tackling the issue of equal remuneration.
@rebecca: you make some very interesting points. Your example of the feminine word for ‘mayor’ originally meaning the consort of the official is, of course, an issue in English too, but while a female mayor is now universally referred to as a ‘mayor’ in Britain, there is an inhibition against referring to her husband as the mayoress, because the ‘- – ess’ ending is perceived as grammatically feminine. If we could get over the assumption that sex and grammatical gender should coincide, and that ‘mayoress’ simply meant ‘the spouse or partner of a mayor, who undertakes some official duties with, or on behalf of, the mayor’, it wouldn’t matter. ‘King’ and ‘Queen’ are similar cases. A Queen Regnant, such as my country has had for nearly 60 years, should really be called a King.
There are related problems in the case of same-sex partners in civil partnerships, effectively marriages. Fortunately, the word ‘spouse’ is there for the using, though ‘partner’ is still the most common term, but I have seen husband starting to come in for both partners in a male marriage; I don’t think I have encountered ‘wife’ used for both members of a lesbian couple, though. These examples show society changing, and affecting the direction of change in language. This happens all the time. But language being changed and thereby having an effect on society is much more problematic, because that isn’t how language evolution normally works: it generally follows, rather than leads, changes in mind-set. Doubtless there are many published studies on these issues, including comparisons between English and other languages when it comes to the problems of relating social and linguistic change.
The agTigress nickname (a personal question, indeed, but I have no objection at all to it!). Yes, ‘ag’ there means argentum, silver, but is not in any way symbolic of age. It is a reference to a specific artefact made of silver.
🙂
@ Ann Somerville: no hard feelings. I understand very well the frustration that one can feel when an issue that fills one with passion and fury does not have quite the same effect on others. All of us are shaped by our own experiences, good and bad, and one person’s burning emotional issue will be another’s mildly interesting intellectual proposition.
I think that advancing age actually does make a substantial difference. Looking at the changes that have taken place, and those that haven’t, over a period of, say, half a century: reflecting on the battles one has fought and won, and those that one has lost: contemplating the enormity of some future changes and the often minor achievements of the past: acknowledging the futility of trying to influence many of one’s fellow-humans: facing the diminishing physical and intellectual powers of old age. All these are inclined to undermine the burning revolutionary fervour of youth and even the dogged focus of maturity. It is all too easy to feel that it is now the turn of others to try to improve society. They often have to fight again the same battles we fought and thought we had won, and this is very dispiriting to see. It is also one of the reasons why a good knowledge of history is valuable. But I digress.
Thanks for clarifying the figure of speech you meant: I was trying to apply synecdoche to the allusion to fleas and ears, rather than metonymy to chairs. Yes, of course the chair is symbolic of the authority, but the Chairman’s chair is also literal, and is often of a different design from those of the other members of a committee. I have no problem with the verb ‘to chair’ (or ‘to table’; meetings are very furniture-oriented). However, having a mind that is both hopelessly literal and highly visual, phrases like, ‘please address your remarks to the Chair’ invariably strike me as absurd, because I see only the actual chair in my mind’s eye rather than its (epicene) occupant. This has to do with individual language-processing, and will vary widely.
[I hope this doesn’t double-post; the first “submit” doesn’t seem to have taken.]
Rebecca: like AgTigress, I’m intrigued by some of the points you raise…but I still find myself drawing different conclusions than you (and Ann) seem to reach. It seems I need to amplify a bit after all….
Some background first. I am old enough that my public school education (for the record, that’s in US public schools) occurred just prior to the initial wave of inclusive-language fervor. My teachers, textbooks, and role models shaped me to believe that “man” meant people in general, so that the Declaration of Independence, the King James Bible, Star Trek’s opening credits, and Neil Armstrong’s moon-landing speech all took in men and women alike.
What this means is that I really don’t look at Donne or Shakespeare or Darwin in the same way that Ann does—and what that means is that her proposed thought experiment can’t work the way she wants it to. Two assumptions are implicit in the framing of that experiment: first, that the works she cites are, objectively, the product of gender bias, and second, that there’s only one right way to respond to the bias she perceives in those works.
The ensuing discussion has demonstrated, I think, that neither of these assumptions is sustainable. The textual analysis of the larger Hamlet passage indicates that Shakespeare may, indeed, have been consciously exploring issues of gender—but that opens the door to a variety of possible interpretations, some indicative of bias and others not. The Donne passage is likewise subject to interpretation and examination of context, and we’ve all acknowledged that Darwin’s use of “man” reflects the word’s neutral scientific meaning.
There’s another factor in play as well; we filter our perceptions of Shakespeare and Donne through at least two layers of language: the meanings in use when the works were written, and those in use when we encounter the works today. Add in the variables that arise from individual theatrical productions, and the range of perception widens further. (I’m planning a trip to a regional Shakespeare festival later this summer, whose production of Julius Caesar is nominally transplanted to the US Senate and offers us a woman in the role of Caesar. Some Shakespearean purists may regard this as heresy; I expect to find it fascinating.)
In the end, I remain puzzled. I’ve said more than once that I agree with Ann where new, modern writing is concerned; using appropriate inclusive constructions is courteous and proper. Ann has said she doesn’t disagree with my firmly stated view that sanitizing pre-existing works is inappropriate at best. And while I haven’t explicitly said so before now, I’ll readily acknowledge that world history includes any number of cultures and governments that haven’t treated women and minorities very well. So I don’t quite see what I’ve said to merit the degree of ire I’ve apparently aroused.
Poor John. So courteous and polite- so completely not getting the point of the example in the first place. I guess there’s no blind spot like privilege.
Then let me ask you directly, Eli—what is it that you (and, evidently, Ann) wanted me to say? As I’ve noted above, I don’t think Ann and I are likely to reach a meeting of minds, but at this point I’m not even certain what it is that we’re in disagreement about.
@JamiSings—If you haven’t already found the name of the film you’re referring to, I believe it’s “Things you Can Tell Just By Looking at Her” directed by Rodrigo Garcia.
Interestingly, the actor Daniel Woodburn—who played Kathy Baker’s neighbor—wrote to Roger Ebert objecting to being called a “midget” in Ebert’s review of one of his films. He feels “midget” and “dwarf” are akin to hate speech and he prefers the term “little person”.
There’s an interesting exchange of correspondence between Ebert and Woodburn at Roger Ebert’s site—under “Dwarfs, Little People and the M-Word.”
Hi all—I found “Lady Jane” at a little one-room library in our library system (the sole copy in the three county system) and it IS the book to which I was referring! So many thanks to those who gave me the title. I misremebered some of the plot elements—it is a rags to riches tale of Jane rising from lowly status to that of “Lady”. Also her first husband was not born a little person but suffered an injury something like Toulouse-Lautrec. But I am enjoying the story greatly—it’s great fun to read it again!