To blog or not to blog

I think in my last blog I mentioned that we were changing our interweb provider and that I had concerns that the switch may not go smoothly. I have to take back any accusations I may have made on that front, and say that the transition from one ISP to the other couldn’t have been easier. I think we lost connectivity for no more than seven seconds. Brilliant! I stand corrected. That said, the service since then has been abysmal. Nightmare. Up and down like Cynthia Payne’s panties or Dr Jeckyll’s mood swings. We have a bi-polar router which seems to exhibit all the unpredictable moods of a manic depressive. One minute she’s fine, super-fast downloads, like a router on E, the next, she throws a strop and kicks us offline for no apparent reason then sulks for about thirty minutes, with a definite reduction of serotonin in her CPU. She’s a right temperamental cow and really does take several minutes of coaxing to let us back on line. We have to stroke her ego, telling her how wonderful she is, with slim, gorgeous lines, dazzling flashing LEDs, and a dongle to die for. Her hubs do NOT look big in that case; she’s perfect in every way. Usually it takes the promise of a candle-lit dinner and a box of chocolates before she’ll agree, with reluctance, to ‘give out’. And she IS a SHE. There’s no doubt about it.

The French and German’s have the right idea – they assign genders to all inanimate (and animate) objects. I think we should do something similar in the UK. Not to complicate the grammar – we don’t need different verb declensions depending on gender or familiarity. Just “He is”, “She is” and for undecided objects, “It is”. We do it anyway for many things – ships are always, “…and all who sail in her” Trains are male, such as “The Flying Scotsman”. Many vessels/vehicles are assigned the feminine gender as evidenced by such expressions as “Fill ‘er up” or “Take her for a spin”. The difference I’m suggesting is that WE should be able to dictate the gender of objects we own, depending on their quirks and personalities.

I’m absolutely not advocating that we need to classify every object with a gender, although that might be fun for the easy things, such as bassoons, bras, spades, doilies, fires, mountains, hoses, cabbages or wheels, but would get somewhat tedious when delving into the realms of chemicals and particle physics. Our European protagonists have it far too complicated anyway and besides, they don’t agree on the assigned gender anyway. For example, take the words for ‘the sun’ and ‘the moon’; in German it’s ‘die Sonne’ (feminine) and ‘der Mond’ (masculine), but in French ‘la lune’ and ‘le soleil’, the other way around. Does, “The moon, she is clear tonight” not sound more romantic? But there again, we assume there to be a ‘man in the moon’ which would imply a degree of masculinity. I assume there are panels of experts who sit and decide what gender should be assigned to every new word, or is it done via a vote? Maybe they let the word loose for a while without a gender and see which way it tends towards. Does it feel it’s inner woman or would it prefer to be a chap? What if it’s gay, or bisexual? Fine if it wants to be hermaphrodite – it can be an ‘it’ but what if it is a female word trapped in a male word’s body? What right do we have to impose gender on a word anyway? Enlightened families allow their words, I mean children, to grow up with whatever gender identity they prefer. Can a word be surgically altered to change its orientation? Can a ‘towelette’ get the snip to become a much more masculine towel? Surely that way lies chaos – or we’d not know whether to order a cheese and ham omelette or a mushroom omel! Maybe free-range words are not such a good idea and if a word HAS to have a gender then it is decided at birth. But what a job THAT would be! For example, would you like to suggest the gender for any of the following?

• Draculin – an anticoagulant found in the saliva of vampire bats.
• Olympiadane –  a mechanically-interlocked compound based on the topology for the Olympic rings.
• Psicose – (C6H12O6), a rare low-calorie sugar that provides 0.3% as much energy as sucrose.
• Cadaverine – a foul-smelling diamine produced by putrefaction of dead animal tissue.

We do have some genderised words in English, such as Actor and Actress, Master and Mistress, Niece and Nephew but these only go so far and are more misleading than evidence of a rule. We would, for example, not call a female consultant a Doctress or have a builderess advise on a new conservatory. Yet we make a silly distinction between blond (Masc) and blonde (Fem), depending on the gender of the person wearing the hair, even though the hair itself is pretty neutral in terms of its own gender. You wouldn’t say, “It’s a blond hair and I found him in my soup” or “It’s a blonde hair and I found her in my soup”, but “It’s a blond/e hair and I found it in my soup” is accepted, even though we have gone to all the trouble of defining the gender of the hair!  (and the first two examples are sufficiently ambiguous to leave you wondering if it was the hair or the owner of the hair that was found in the soup). It doesn’t happen with black or brown or brunette (surely brunette should be female?), so why do we need to give blond/e hair a specific gender? And if that particular colour refers to a wig, which could be worn by either gender, which word would we use? I guess we’d circumvent the problem by calling it ‘platinum’. Does blonde dye only work on female hair, and what colour does it turn male follicles?  In these days of equality and political correctness many female thespians are billing themselves as Actors – Dame Judy Dench does just that. The dictionary (Collins and others) defines an Actor as a person who acts in a play, film, or broadcast (note lack of gender), whereas an Actress is a female actor. Seems a bit unfair that! Women get to use either word whereas men are lumbered with one. Author/Authoress works the same way, and we do have many other words that imply gender:

But these all relate to people or things with a sex, rather than gender – in French, German and many other languages the sex does not necessarily determine the gender. For example Irish cailín “girl” is masculine, while stail “stallion” is feminine. For us, a pen is a thing, and ‘it’ and needs no ‘s/he’ form or verb declination. We don’t have to remember grammatical rules for declension of definite articles – I still remember reciting “der, die, das, die, den, die, das, die, des, der, des, der, dem, der, dem, den” in German lessons at school and that was just to be able to know the correct form of ‘the’ to use!

For most animals we have a choice of three options; he, she or it, unless the word for the animal is also gender-specific. So, a dog can be he, she, or it, with his, her or its bone, but a bull can only be a he or an it, because bulls are male. So if a cat can take the three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter [and what about a male dog that has been neutered?] the why can’t a doctor? We’d go and see him or her, but to go and see it would be very disrespectful. We have two male cats, one is prettier than the other, with a slim face whereas his brother is more blocky in appearance and heavier set. People often assume their gender based on their looks, which can be quite amusing, especially if the visitor wimps out and opt for ‘it’ which just sounds rude!

But my proposal is simpler, although probably very politically incorrect. We should simply refer to objects based on the characteristics they present. David’s car is (despite what he may tell you) very much a ‘she’. Nice car, bit quirky, and tends to suffer from whims and mood swings. She’s gold, quite slim, and can be a bit petulant at times. She’s jealous too – doesn’t always like it if I get in the passenger seat, and sometimes locks my door even when David has pressed the remote to open them. But she’s not ‘girlie’; more a woman of today who likes to inflict her personality but is always up for a good, hard, ride. Bit of a goer – likes club music, has a thing for mirrors too. If she goes wrong, she goes very wrong, like a crazed thing on PMT. My car however is a bloke. No doubt. Just gets on with what he is used to. Solid, doesn’t need much attention, reliable on a long journey – the sort of car you know would turn up at the pub for a pint, even if it were pissing down. It’d get you home, even if it had a broken leg, ‘cos your its mate and that’s what mates do.

iPhones are female. I will expand no further on that specific item.

Our kettle is harder to define – it’s male, I’m sure, quite stocky, brushed steel, clean lines, but more metrosexual. It has a filter and a blue light. Not enough to make it camp, but it’s letting you know it is in touch with its feminine side too. Mugs are male, cups are female.

Our new server is an interesting one – I’m going to plump for it being a teenage boy I think. Bit grumpy, quite reluctant to do anything more than just sit there looking a little pissed off with the world and its lot in life. You know not to ask it to do anything out of the ordinary. I mean, if it were an actual teenage boy, you’d not ask it to cook dinner for example – you’d end up with everything fried and burnt chips!

Speaking of electronics, our Sky box is male too, but not a “bloke”, not “one of the lads”. More your kind of low-achiever that had potential but ended up getting some bimbo pregnant at the age of 16 and has never really amounted to much since then. Can’t really be relied upon, certainly can’t multi-task. Forgets where it is and what it is supposed to be doing. Ask it to record a programme and it’ll probably forget, or record a different one. Or just get bored half way through the recording and go to sleep with its slippers and a Horlicks.

We had a food blender (well, we still have it, but it is relegated, dismissed, banished and otherwise abandoned) which was extremely idiosyncratic and had more human characteristics than I care to recall. Temperamental is a good starting point, and things got worse from there. I’m thinking spoilt child of the Veruca Salt variety (See Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for more details). Sometimes it wouldn’t start, then when it/she did it/she spat and screamed and moaned and generally refused to cooperate on every level. ‘She’ was fine with the things she liked, like fruit or even making breadcrumbs, but would she blend anything to make a soup? Wouldsheheckaslike! You had to slip a tea-towel over her, so she couldn’t see what you were doing, then whistle nonchalantly, looking the other way, whilst secretly sneaking up to stab at the ‘pulse’ button and force the lid down hard with all your might lest she throw it, and her contents, in a projectile vomit of leek, potato and stock, several feet in the air in something akin to a mushroom cloud!

I know, this is anthropomorphism taken to the extreme but it works for me, and it did Walt Disney no harm (dancing brooms in Fantasia, talking mice, even more recent outings in such endeavours as Toy Story), nor Beatrix Potter (Peter Rabbit et al), Lewis Caroll (Alice’s encounters with the white rabbit and talking playing cards) or Aesop and his fables! This idea of assigning animal or inanimate objects with personality or human characteristics goes back way beyond the days of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” or “Itchy and Scratchy” and is the basis of many of the oldest religions.  I’m thinking the Egyptians with Horus the falcon, Anubis the Jackal or Ra the Sun, although technically this is Anthropotheism – ascribing human form and nature to gods, or the belief that gods are only deified human beings. If one were to be of a theological bent (not just bent in other ways) one would say that we anthropthemise the Christian God, making Him in our own image (or was it supposed to be the other way round?) – did God make us in His image, or do we make God in our image? I guess that is down to belief and I concur that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but if I were a God, making a new race of people, I think I’d make a few design improvements of the current blueprint!

Whilst meandering down the semi-theological backwaters of my mind I also wonder about the examples we have where we’ve just ended up smashing together human and animal to produce a wonder of Therianthropy (joining together of part man, part beast) – the Centaur, half human, half horse (yet a gentle and tender lover) and represented in modern astrology by Sagittarius, who’s human part is that of an Archer (bow and arrow, not Radio 4 farming family). There is also the Minotaur, half man, half bull and of course not to forget the mermaid/merman. There’s Pan too – part man, part goat, with his pipes and an image not dissimilar to the cloven-hoofed iconography of the Devil, although I prefer a slightly less satanic depiction, as per this sketch I did many moons ago.

We do this sort of thing all the time, and it isn’t just animals or food blenders that get the treatment. We do it to concepts too. We’ve all seen images of the wind blowing, with HIS chubby cheeks and wavy hair, (and to maintain the theme, how often is God likened to the wind in that “You don’t need to see it to feel its effect” – it seems we have a need to provide an anthropomorphic visualisation though). We do the same thing with the concept of death via the Grim Reaper.

Terry Pratchett uses the phrase anthropomorphic personification in his Discworld series, with his recurrent character of Death as the most popular example. (Personification is a literary form whereby human characteristics are given to objects – the sun hid behind the clouds – rather than the full anthropomorphic treatment of the sun where it is treated as if it were a human:

The sun has got his hat on
Hip, hip, hip hooray
The sun has god his hat on
And he’s coming out to play

Time, of course, is male (as in Father Time) and lives happily alongside Mother Nature.

I don’t think I have ever picked up a slug and thought it to be female – all slugs are male in my eyes (hermaphrodite by biology and dead if there were any justice in the world).

Tea pots are male, and gay. (If you need me to explain why, you are far too young and must have been brought up in a time after the BBC banned a certain nursery rhyme and accompanying actions).

Interestingly David tends to apply things slightly differently. He still assigns human characteristics to inanimate objects, but almost always in the neutral form, not gender specific. And usually when said item has done something wrong. We get a lot of that in our house; objects that misbehave. Good examples are the times he tells me, “the drink spilt”, “it snapped”, “it fell on the floor”, “it ripped” etc – all things that these items seem to manage to do to or by themselves without any provocation or assistance. We have some very talented items all of which could probably star in their own contemporary version of “Bed-knobs and Broomsticks” which would be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

Bookmark It