[Artemisia] Smalls and language

[Megen/Phoebe]

I'm sorry... but I will never call a child a "small".  I think it's degrading.  Tell a child he is "small" long enough and he will believe it in many different aspects of the word.
   
  Megen

S CLEMENGER <sclemenger at msn.com> wrote:
  Interesting. You must be hanging out in places I don't, because I've neither seen nor experienced that kind of behavior. My understanding of the move away from words/jargon such as "farspeaker" and "dragon" and "smalls" and neologisms such as "feastocrat" and "nastyocrat" is that it is, in general, intended to move us (as a group) away from the overly cutesy and/or inaccurate terms to ones more accurate, more "adult," and less jargon-y. If we're trying to speak "in persona," why *not* use a term that that persona would have been more likely to use? How is it possibly an impoverishment of a language to endeavor to be more accurate when communicating in that language?
--Maire
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Stephanae Baker 
To: Kingdom of Artemisia mailing list 
Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 11:21 AM
Subject: [Artemisia] Smalls and language



My point is that we speak modern English, and I am for anything that 
enriches our lexicon and against anything that would impoverish it. 
In fact, I have some amount of difficulty understanding the many 
arguments I see in the SCA that indicate we should have only a single 
word for each concept. To bring up the oft-referred-to waster 
conversation, I remember that several people in that conversation 
proposed simply calling the objects "swords." Why not call a sword a 
sword? Well, were we to go that route, we would have merchants at 
events selling sharp objects made of metal called swords; we would 
have grown men and women fighting with tape-wrapped rattan objects 
called swords; and we would have people of all ages sometimes 
fighting with foam and cloth objects called swords. We would 
ultimately end up modifying the noun sword in order to distinguish 
between these many "swords." We'd end up with "heavy fighter swords" 
and "youth swords" at the very least. So why not head that problem 
off, if possible, by keeping more nouns in our lexicon?

Why do we want to eliminate so many words from the English language? 
Is it not bad enough that we've already lost almost all declension, 
conjugation, and the intimate second person singular? Do we not have 
room enough in our Society for both people who use the word 
"children" and people who use the word "smalls?" And, isn't it nice 
to be able to use more than one word for something and possibly still 
remain in persona?
_______________________________________________
Artemisia mailing list
Artemisia at lists.gallowglass.org
http://lists.gallowglass.org/mailman/listinfo/artemisia


       
---------------------------------
Shape Yahoo! in your own image.  Join our Network Research Panel today!