A couple of months ago (or longer…I didn’t write down the date)\u00a0 I saw a discussion on Twitter of the need for gender-free terms to use in space-related activities.\u00a0\u00a0 Most of us (and certainly at least half of us) are aware that the old agreement that “man” and “men” included “woman” and “women” was, basically a lie.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That usage included women only when men found it convenient not to have to add “and women” to something, and the rest of the time it did indeed mean the male of the species, exclusive of the female.\u00a0\u00a0 (Which is why we needed a separate Constitutional Amendment to allow women to vote. \u00a0 It was a bad compromise to start with–it lent itself to the fourth-term fallacy in logic, for instance, when the same word can mean two different things and thus cause confusion and even invalidate a logical argument. “Man” did have the advantage of its traditional use as a verb as well as a noun, and replacements for it should (ideally) share that ability.<\/p>\n
Women started pushing back on that, and gradually publishers and editors began devising, or picking up, gender-free terms for published work.\u00a0 But they did so reluctantly and without really considering the audiences involved.\u00a0\u00a0 For instance, since publishing houses and magazines have “staffs,” they quickly moved to using “staff” in many cases were “man” or “men” had previously been used.\u00a0\u00a0 Years back, I had an enthusiastic editor make that change in one of my military SF books, so that\u00a0 “Man the guns” (a traditional military usage)\u00a0 became “Staff the guns,” a usage that would’ve made any military reader throw the book at the wall.\u00a0 I argued hard, and won, keeping the usage.\u00a0\u00a0 (Far enough in the future, it could be that isolated mil-specific usages like that could survive and not be considered sexist.\u00a0 Maybe.)<\/p>\n
The more recent discussion, including astronauts and journalists covering space and astronomy,\u00a0 led me to think more about this issue, about the vocabulary we already have to distinguish those whose occupations are very different.\u00a0 Who has a staff?\u00a0 Who has a crew?\u00a0 Who has a team?\u00a0 Who has a group?\u00a0\u00a0 Who has a gang?\u00a0 Some terms are used in more than one setting, but there’s always a term that’s not OK, and a term that’s always OK in that context.\u00a0\u00a0 When there are multiple possible terms, the usual cause is a recent incursion by biz-speak to make “teams” out of something, because the sports metaphor is supposed to engender “spirit.”\u00a0 (Suzette Haden Elgin wrote decades ago that the dominant energizing metaphors in the US were the wagon train and football.\u00a0 Any wagon train or football reference would “work” for most Americans.\u00a0 Not sure about the wagon train one now, but the football one is still live.\u00a0 Idiot talking heads on TV refer to “Hail Mary pass” and “fumbled the ball” in discussions of politics.)<\/p>\n
Here are some basics on vocabulary of “groups working together” that should be considered for non-gendered terms in specific occupations, with their most common current usages.<\/p>\n
Staff: hospitals, hotels, restaurants, large stores, bureaucracies.\u00a0\u00a0 Staff can also be a verb–to supply staff for such an enterprise.\u00a0 Staff (military and political) are support positions for “line”…non-combat in the military, non-authority in politics.\u00a0\u00a0 Within the staff of one institution, there may be teams (surgical team, in\u00a0 a hospital, event planning team in hotel)\u00a0 that do one kind of thing.<\/p>\n
Crew:\u00a0 transportation carrying groups of people, weapons, cargo.\u00a0 Thus trains, ships, aircraft, spaceships, the International Space Station.\u00a0 Also used in construction of those working on one project together.\u00a0\u00a0 All these have one person in command, and a crew with specific duties.\u00a0 In military trains\/ships\/aircraft, everyone aboard is part of the crew.\u00a0 In civilian usage, passenger vessels have passengers (not in the crew, no defined duties) and crew.<\/p>\n
Team: sports,\u00a0 business in its rah-rah team-building mood,\u00a0 sometimes in R&D (design team) especially in STEM fields. \u00a0 A team has a defined and often simple* goal (win the game, build that playground, design that new aircraft).\u00a0 Teams within staff are limited to the team’s assignment.\u00a0\u00a0 * Does not imply easy or trivial, so put your hackles back down.<\/p>\n
Group: alliance of previously independent entities, common in business.\u00a0 Informal “groups” nearly always organize into something more resembling a team or crew when they want to get something done.<\/p>\n
Gang: in mining, a group of miners working in the same part of the mine, on the same shift.\u00a0\u00a0 Any group of workers (blue-collar) led by a foreman.\u00a0\u00a0 A group of criminals working together.\u00a0 A group of children\/juveniles in a neighborhood.<\/p>\n
So for writing about space, spacecraft, and missions in space (including the first-contact phase of settlement) “crew” is the best choice.\u00a0\u00a0 The ISS isn’t “staffed” but “crewed.”\u00a0\u00a0 Some have objected that it sounds like “crude”\u00a0 and thus can be mistaken when spoken, but we have a plethora of words that sound alike and people know which one is which by context.\u00a0 “John and Mary will marry on Saturday.”\u00a0\u00a0 (In some dialects, yes, Mary, marry, and merry do not sound alike.\u00a0\u00a0 Where I grew up, they all do.)\u00a0 There are others.\u00a0\u00a0 Their sounds are just alike.\u00a0 They’re confusing only when you’re a child and learning to write the right one in the blank in your workbook.\u00a0\u00a0 “The next launch will carry a crew of four, but the one after that won’t be crewed” should be clear by context.\u00a0\u00a0 Or we could use “crewless.”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 “We don’t have enough environmental techs to crew that new space station.”<\/p>\n
The journalists joining in the discussion earlier this year pointed out that they could not use a word like “crewless” because it’s not in the dictionary their editors use, and their editors would change it.\u00a0 But new words enter the language all the time.\u00a0\u00a0 And it occurred to me that one way they enter the language is via science fiction.\u00a0 Because science fiction and fantasy writers are allowed to create and use neologisms and some of them become popular enough to be used by anyone.\u00a0 (Consider how fast the fossils of small hominids became “hobbits” in the scientific discussions.\u00a0 And how ubiquitous the word “robot” is.)\u00a0\u00a0 So I had the idea of using the ungendered terms in my science fiction, as a way of making them accessible to journalists who are too bound by editorial conservatism to allow use of a word not in their dictionary.\u00a0\u00a0 And wrote to my editor, who agreed that I could use the “crewed\/crewless” pair in the next book out, instead of “staffed\/unstaffed”.<\/p>\n
Both the context of the book itself (is it military-themed?\u00a0 Industry?\u00a0 Transportation?\u00a0 Bureaucratic?) and the likely audience for it should be considered when choosing terms.\u00a0\u00a0 The most-used terms for the context should be used if not inventing wholly new ones.\u00a0\u00a0 (In other words, don’t “staff” the weapons or “crew” the hotel.)<\/p>\n
I\u00a0 welcome additional input from astronauts and others actually involved in space exploration.\u00a0 I expect to be writing more books, and I know other writers who might also be co-opted into helping the language you want get into dictionaries where journalists can use it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A couple of months ago (or longer…I didn’t write down the date)\u00a0 I saw a discussion on Twitter of the need for gender-free terms to use in space-related activities.\u00a0\u00a0 Most of us (and certainly at least half of us) are aware that the old agreement that “man” and “men” included “woman” and “women” was, basically Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,10],"tags":[7,26],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-the-writing-life","tag-tools-for-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":247,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions\/247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}