Re: Welcome Christine! And the "woman" issue. WAS: lunatic survey

----- Original Message -----
From: "David J. Peterson" <dedalvs@...>


> Sally wrote:
> <<
> Once I opined, and I may have been wrong, that women on average are
> trained
> in American (and perhaps European) society to be practical minded, and
> that
> there is something inherently "uncool" in exposing excessive
> enthusiasm, or
> involving themselves in pursuits that don't immediately yield some kind
> of
> profitable endeavor--such as competing to get into college, graduate
> school,
> or at the very least, being "taken seriously as a professional."  These
> are
> potent concerns for women these days.
> >>
>
> Umm...these days?  I thought the whole trend since the late 80's was
> that
> in high school, women dominated honors and AP classes (that was
> certainly
> the case in my school), and it's certainly the case that women outnumber
> men in at least some universities (e.g., the entire UC system--the
> statistics
> came out just last month).
Yes.  Just last month.  My point exactly.  Girls are beginning to dominate
boys in college entrance exams in all areas of study.  There was an anxious
editorial about it that I read in I forget what paper last year.
Statistically, high school boys in America are falling behind, and this is a
problem that is only now being recognized.

And seeing that I'm over fifty, and was aware and studying during the
sixties, "these days" probably covers a longer period of time for me than it
does for you.  Since the eighties?  My God, I was a professional, then!
That was yesterday!   ;)

> In linguistics classes up at Berkeley, women
> outnumbered men by far, and I've noticed the same trend here at UCSD.
> But of those people, you'd be more likely to find a closet conlanger or
> conlang sympathizer amongst men than women.  In fact, of the people
> up at Berkeley that knew about me conlanging, it was always the women
> who'd say things like, "Why would you waste your time doing something
> so stupid?"
Exactly my point, David.  Perhaps competitive women, on the whole, don't
want to waste time on the road to social and professional success.  I've
known that since I was knee high to a grass hopper that "having it all"
(profession, good sex life, marriage, money, social prestige, children) was
urged very seriously on women starting in the last third of the twentieth
century.  As Cristina wrote (sorry for misspelling your name, Cristina!),
and I think she has a terrific point, the statistics show at least among
computer games that more males than females like to learn by immersion,
whereas women grow impatient.  I know and understand this kind of
impatience, especially as the years are passing even faster and faster for
me.  More below:

> You know who would be an interesting study?  My girlfriend.  She's my
> age, and also majored in linguistics at Berkeley (as well as
> anthropology),
> and she's here at UCSD as a linguistics graduate student.  She DEVOURS
> fantasy and sci-fi novels--literally.  She can read three 500 page
> books in
> a day--I've seen her do it (and here I am still reading The Divine
> Comedy
> which I've been working on since high school...  Man, if I had her
> skills...!).
Dante takes special concentration! :)

> She loves fantasy/sci-fi movies and shows, and engages in various
> hobbies
> (dollhouses, needlepoint, etc.).  And, I discovered, she, with her a
> couple
> of her siblings, used to conculture avidly as kids.  That is, they'd
> create
> imaginary societies, with imaginary people and imaginary clothes and
> maps and governments.  But language?  Absolutely not.  In fact--and
> this is something really interesting--she was introduced to language
> creation in elementary school.  One of her elementary school teachers
> came up with a lesson where the class broke into groups and the groups
> each tried to invent their own language, trying to figure out what was
> important.  And--this is kicker--she was really good at it!  Her group
> was the only one that passed the "test" at the end: to see if certain
> things could be translated.  All the groups were spending time thinking
> about "Should we have the letter 'y'?", and "What should the color of
> our flag be?", but my girlfriend (Erin is her name) knew that what they
> needed was basic vocabulary and combinatory rules, and so they really
> did well, and were the only ones to do well.
It would be interesting to interview her.  With all her interest in
mythopoeia, not to mention her graduate study in linguistics, you'd think
she'd have more interest in it.  But on the other hand, making up imaginary
societies and clothes, and maps and things, is a whole lot easier than
making up a language and sticking with it.  It's so much more abstract.
Perhaps your girlfriend has other more immediate goals in mind that are
equally daunting and difficult: amassing information, writing that
dissertation, getting her Ph.D., getting a job.  I did all that mythopoeic
stuff, too, but for some reason I also stuck with the language, but
spottily, David.  I had no interest in Teonaht for an entire decade while I
was busy becoming an Anglo-Saxonist. I didn't really pick it up again until
after I got tenure.  Many of its more intricate features are due to my
having studied medieval vernaculars.  Then when I discovered the list seven
years ago, it was a fury of enthusiastic involvement.

> Anyway, so, add *all* of this up, plus the fact that she has a boyfriend
> who's a language enthusiast and avid conlanger, and try to square the
> fact that conlanging, as such, doesn't interest her in the slightest.
> She's
> more interested in sports, for which she has little or no interest.  She
> can't be bothered even to discuss it, or hear about it.  Outside of the
> one project at school, she's never taken it up on her own.  I've asked
> her why before, and sometimes she says she doesn't see the point;
> other times she's said it would be too hard; other times she's said
> she has other things she wants to be doing with her free time.  And
> that's fine, of course.  I'm just personally baffled at how someone
> with her background could not even be the slightest bit interested
> in conlanging.
>
> So, sorry for that digression, but it seemed relevant.  (Oh, another
> interesting factoid: For how much she likes fantasy, she despises
> Tolkien.)
Not hard to understand!  :)  I like Tolkien, but I'm not devoted to him or
his languages.

> Back to the point about women and conlanging.  If conlanging is
> something that's commonly seen as a "nerd" activity, that could be
> part of the answer.  If you ask me to define a prototypical nerd,
> geek, whatever, I'll list a bunch of traits, and will *undoubtedly*
> picture someone who's male.  Star Trek, Star Wars, fantasy--the
> whole bit.  For every trait I can come up with, I know women
> who can be associated with them.  However, I picture the prototypical
> Trekkie, video game junkie, model train builder, etc., to be male.
> Again, it's not a true generalization, but it's a generalization that
> I have.  So it might be the case that the prototypical "nerd" things
> have male associations, and that might be why there appear to
> be more male than female conlangers.  That's just a guess based
> on nothing but mere conjecture, but I thought I'd throw it out
> there.
Well, that's what I was trying to say in more abstract terms, David.  Thanks
for these observations.  I was a trekker, too, but instead of dressing up
like Tasha Yar, what I did was bank on it (literally) and sell a Star Trek
teleplay.  That effort came straight out of my obsession with the show, and
it was my own brand of creativity.  And I sold it under the current
pseudonym I have to this day.  But it was absolutely paramount (excuse the
pun) that I not let my hiring department know that I was moonlighting in
this way. (They later found out and forgave me.)  Ditto with the conlanging.
The pseudonym worked for this list.  As for the academic approach to
conlanging, it is a way to make it fit in with my sense of myself as a
scholar.  Also my love of scholarship.

I keep saying that I will put down the professor's mantle and get back to
writing fiction and poetry and playing music, but the imperatives are always
that I prove myself in a university setting--and kill forever that dreamy
girl that my family made so much fun of.  That's my right hand talking.  My
left eye still has poetry in its sight, and game, and creation and mystery.

Thank God for the left eye.
Sally

Euil Yrlo toil epa hsinva mareadaf!
To God for that left eye give praise.