reality check

[calimac]

Is this article on "Why Aren't There More Woman Sci-Fi Writers?" as condescending as it looks from here? (The author is male, of course.) (And besides that it should be "SF", not "sci-fi", shouldn't it be "women", or better yet "female", rather than "woman"?)

First it tries to excuse poorer review coverage of SF books by women by saying they write fewer of them, but since women write more of the fantasy than they do of the SF proper, the article fails by not matching that up to the coverage of the review surveys. If women only write 1/4 of SF proper, then it makes sense that the SF proper coverage of a review magazine would be only 1/4 women. But is the survey talking just about SF or about SF/F? The article doesn't say.

Then it tries to explain the sex-ratio differential between SF and F by attempting to say that women are less geeky than men. First, it means less nerdy, not less geeky. Second, it fudges the distinction between less nerdy and fewer nerds. Third, it disappears the prominent female nerds. Fourth, by acknowledging that epic Martinesque fantasy can be just as labyrinthine as hard sf (it actually uses the words "hard sci-fi", a combination I don't think I've heard before), it implies that women shouldn't worry their pretty little heads about scientific details. And last, it seems actually to say outright that women are "casual fans", not "hardcore". Which is ridiculous, if you've been to any hardcore fandoms in the last, oh, thirty years or more.

Then, despite trying to acknowledge that not all SF is like this, it paints a picture of hard SF as if it were all still being written by Hugo Gernsback. Oh, please. And even if you want to toss out people like Le Guin and Connie Willis as too "soft" (or "humanist" in genre terminology), can you write about women and hard sf - the real kind, with spaceships and battles and at least a veneer of scientific literacy (not that Le Guin isn't fabulously literate in the sciences she uses) - without mentioning, at the very least, Lois Bujold?

Then he writes, "The most popular and respected authors also tend to be male, as China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, and Brandon Sanderson can attest." (Sanderson, really? Has he risen that far, that fast? I found his first novel nonsensical and never tried any more.) It doesn't mention that they're all, with Miéville as an only partial exception, far more fantasy writers than SF. But later on he writes, "The three most successful fantasy authors of the past decade—J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, and Stephenie Meyer—are women." How exactly does successful not equal popular, and are you trying to say these women's work is not respected? Because, well, by some it isn't. And is that supposed to be because they're women?

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Suzanne Collins, the author of The Hunger Games and its sequels? I should not have called those "fantasy." They're set in the future (a dystopian future, but dystopia itself is characteristic of sf rather than fantasy), and so far as they have innovative world features, they seem to be sold to the reader/viewer as advanced technology. The worldbuilding isn't rigorous, but that just makes them not hard sf; they're at least as much science fiction as, say, "The Midas Plague" or "Coventry."

[swamp-adder.livejournal.com]

No, it should NOT be "women SF writers". "Women X" ("women writers", "women scientists", etc.) is a pet peeve of mine, because it's ungrammatical. You don't pluralize a modifying noun just because the noun it's modifying is plural. If they were girls instead of women, you wouldn't say girls SF writers. You would say girl SF writers. Or female SF writers, which really sounds better than either of them anyway.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

(A tall, lean, pedantic chap -- with unruly light-colored hair, a great many pockets
 overflowing with markers, pens, and slips of paper, and a striped scarf that brushes the floor at both ends -- approaches thnidu and asks to take over the keyboard for a few moments.)
.

Very nicely pointed out. This had not occurred to me as being ungrammatical, but of course you're quite correct, and the parallel with "girl(s)" shows the point quite clearly. Not to mention the last sentence, he said paraleptically.

He bows and departs, leaving a card:

Dr. Whom

Consulting Linguist, Grammarian
, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody


BTW, lovely icon!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The very fact that you call yourself "Dr. Whom", clever as it is, illustrates the problem I discuss in other comments here. Theodore Bernstein said decades ago that it was time to give up on the "who/whom" wars, and he was right.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

The pronoun is not the point of the sobriquet, though it is key to it. And my h.s. English teacher introduced us (in print) to her "Uncle Ted", whom I enjoy and respect to this day.

And yes, I just used "whom" there because in that construction it came to me naturally, but I try not to prescribe it to other people unless I'm editing something in a formal style.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I did say that "female SF writers" would be best. But grammar depends on actual usage. Taking a quick Google survey, "women scientists" appears ten times as often as "woman scientists." If grammarians claim that this is wrong because we would say "girl scientists" rather than "girls scientists," then grammarians have clearly failed to take into account the existence of an unrecorded but obviously extant grammatical rule in people's minds - and that is where grammar really lives, not on the page, which is merely an imperfect recording of the facts - that plurals made of -en operate differently in this particular context than plurals formed of -s.

This is for the same reason that it's not incorrect to say "It's me" rather than the ridiculous "It is I." If grammarians can't accept that "It" is the subject of that sentence and "me" is the object - which is why people say "It's me" - then grammarians are simply wrong.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree with you about usage, but your grammatical terminology is not accurate. The verb "to be" is not an action verb, but a linking verb, and linking verbs don't have objects.

Why do I say that? Because, in ordinary usage, the subject and the object are two different entities. When they are in fact the same entity, we have a special, intensified form of the pronoun to mark this. We can say "The Spanish Barber shaved Juan" or "The Spanish Barber shaved Antonio," and if we have previously talked about J or A, we can say, "The Spanish Barber shaved him"; but if the person the Spanish Barber shaved was the Spanish Barber, we must say, "The Spanish barber shaved himself." If we say "him," without antecedent, hearers will not normally infer that the Spanish Barber is both subject and object, but that someone else is the object, whom they have failed to hear mentioned, or whom the speaker has failed to identify. And that is because an action verb with two nouns attached normally describes one entity acting on another entity. The special form is even required in "I shaved myself"; we could just say, "I shaved," but "I shaved me" would be totally abnormal.

But we do not say, "It is myself," in ordinary speech. And that's because the verb is not a verb of one thing acting on another, of doing or making or having or suffering; it is a verb that equates to words to the same thing.

In traditional usage, both words would take the subject or nominative form. I agree that current English usage has assimilated "to be" and other linking verbs (at least partially) to action verbs, and that "It's me" is normal usage and "It's I" is archaic or hyperformal. (French is better off with c'est moi! which uses a special demonstrative form of the pronoun for that situation and only that situation.) But "me" still isn't the object; in this case, it's being used to represent the subject.

As to the primary linguistic question, you bring up a good example; I was puzzling over that usage myself. It does seem that in some cases both nouns can be pluralized. I wonder if it's a relic usage? It seems to me that a plural noun ending in -s would jump out at me as obviously wrong.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

But the subject and the object are different entities, logically if not physically speaking. The "it" is an unknown, the object of the inevitable preceding question, "Who is it?" The purpose of the answer, "It's me," is to identify the unknown "it" (subject) with the known "me" (object). But until they're identified, they remain different. The reason we don't say "It's myself" is because we aren't told who "it" is until the act of speaking the sentence is complete, so it wouldn't make sense to say "myself" which refers back to a known subject, which in this case we don't have. Whereas "I shaved myself" begins with "I", so the subject is already identified with the object before the object shows up in the sentence.

I think we could resolve this dilemma with a coherent answer to the question "Who is it?" that doesn't involve the verb "to be."

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Nonetheless, in Indo-European languages that mark case explicitly, both are characteristically in the nominative case.

Traditional English grammatical terminology reflects that: in the sentence "Barack Obama is the president of the United States," the first noun phrase is called the "subject" and the second is called the "predicative nominative." It is never called the "direct object."

Now, I suppose you could say that in that sentence, we have [subject] is [predicate nominative], but that in the sentence "It's the president!" we have [subject] is [direct object]; but it makes more sense to me to say that all sentences with "to be" have the former structure, regardless of whether the subject's reference is known or unknown, and that English has generalized "me" to be used for predicate nominative functions as well as subject functions.

I'd also note the English sentence "Who is she?" as one that still takes the standard nominative case, even though the subject not only is an unknown but is an explicit marker of its being unknown! So even if we accept your argument that "me" is a direct object, your explanation for its being so in terms of the subject being unknown and thus "a different entity" seems questionable. Some other process is probably involved.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Nonetheless, in Indo-European languages that mark case explicitly, both are characteristically in the nominative case.

And that's what causes grammarians to think that we ought to say "It is I." That's where grammarians lose the thread.

For that reason, the grammatical terminology you describe is, in this specific case, simply wrong, and I am going to use correct terminology instead.

It makes a lot more sense to describe the endings of these sentences as objects than to offer a convoluted explanation that "English has generalized "me" to be used for predicate nominative functions." Why has English so generalized "me"? Because in this situation it's actually an object!

Similarly, that the "It" is a different entity seems to me the simplest explanation. "Who is she?" is an imperfect parallel because "Who is she?" is a question, not a statement, and questions are constructed grammatically backwards from statements (a statement would begin "She is ..."), so it makes sense for them to end with a nominative.

[swamp-adder.livejournal.com]

That may be true, but you're the one who started the grammar nitpicking. I'm only suggesting that if you're going to nitpick, you should do it right. : )

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Oh, I am doing it right. It's the nitpickers who don't understand the full complexity of grammatical rules who are wrong.