[Artemisia] "Youth Combat" weapons

[Dawn Tavares]

>Maestro  Don Azir de Lucera
>OP,DWS,KRM,KYCM,DSR

Vanna, I'd like to buy a vowel!

DSR? Defender of the...Silver Rose?


>There is no official Program for 5 and younger. Parents I highly  recommend
>play with your kids. You will have fun and so will your  kids.

An understatement worthy of St. Alan. In Sourthern Artemisia even the 
toddlers want nothing so much as the chance to face off against a grown-up. 
They looooove scoring a hit on someone who's always telling them to clean up 
their room, eat their vegetables, and no, you can't do/have that. Sometimes 
the adults are giggling so hard they can't even defend themselves.

As to the terminology issue: Youth Combat is a good formal name for the 
program, which has grown big enough across the kingdoms that it's finally 
being addressed as its own system within the larger arena of SCA combat. 
Teaching the kids to refer to their tools as weapons in general or by 
specific names (greatsword, shield, whatever) is good training for learning 
to play on the field with adults.

I do think that at least this generation of kids will continue to use the 
term "boffer" because that's what they're used to. I doubt they'll grasp any 
subtle sexual implication in the term; teens are the ones most interested in 
sexual slang, and slang changes by the millisecond these days. I stopped 
trying to keep up with teenspeak long ago.

The move away from "boffer" is meant to mollify nervous adults--because it's 
nervous adults who see danger lurking in every shadow.

Personally I prefer the term "boPPer" because that's what the kids do with 
their weapons: They bop each other. "Bop, thwap, oof! "

Foam weapons really aren't sharp enough to go "poke" or aerodynamic enough 
to go "swish."
;)


Aurora de Portugal
BLS MOY

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