Re: Insult (jara: Weekly Vocab 8)

--- Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...>
wrote:
> >I haven't figured it out yet.  Which is one of the
> >reasons my story about the cloudspirits stalled
> out.
> >There are only so many stylistically valid ways to
> >avoid pronouns and then the text starts *feeling*
> >contrived and . . . Well, in my notes I refer to
> their
> >sexes as alpha, beta, gamma, delta and epsilon.
>
> Most of the good sci-fi I've read involving more
> than two sexes ends up
> having to either sacrifice that to being just an
> interesting cultural
> subnotes  or invent pronouns for them. My earliest
> memory of a 3-sexed
> society was a novel in which the author called them
> "demi-males". Marge
> Piercey make use of "per" as a non-sexed pronoun in
> _Woman on the Edge of
> Time_.
>
AC Crispin's Starbridge series included a race called
something like Elspindor or Esplindor or something
that was neuter before puberty (which took only a few
days) and she used and pronoun "hin" throughout the
tale till the Elspindor character underwent its change
and became a male IIRC.  I found it non-invasive after
only a few pages.

> >And this story has two alphas as main characters
> and
> >at least mentions characters of ALL the genders.
> As
> >did that also stalled piece on Alelliawulian
> >courtship.
>
> My only initial problem with naming them "alphas",
> "betas", etc. is that I
> first think of the alphas, betas, etc in _Brave New
> World_. I then think of
> social ranking - alphas on top, then betas, etc.
> Though I suspect I could
> overcome both these these reading a well-written
> story. You could borrow the
> pronouns for their language, but that too might be
> distratcting.
>
That'd never occurred to me (maybe because of the
degree to which I hated that book) but the Alphas
*are* the socially most dominant.  They are the
leaders.  That's why I applied the lable to them.  I
suppose I *could* use thier native pronouns, but I
don't think it would be a really good soultion since
they wouldn't *feel* "pronoun-y" to an English
speaker.

Adam