[Callers] Callers Digest, Vol 18, Issue 17

[Don Veino via Callers]

While I agree in principle, I respectfully disagree in practice. My
reasoning:

   1. As great as this forum is, it represents just a small portion of the
   total contra dance community and therefore is a partial voice
   2. Without magical powers, I doubt that even this forum will be able to
   agree on a term in a practical span of time (but would be delighted to be
   wrong on this). There's no effective greater "contra rules committee" to
   vet and set a term (I find this a strength, BTW). Folk process rules.
   3. I believe people (dancers included :) are more robust than this and
   deal with synonyms constantly in daily life. This is one call. Were we
   throwing all the terms in the air then that could be chaos - for returning
   dancers. Effective callers dealing with newcomers should be
   defining/teaching their terms as each is introduced over the evening. You
   might get pushback about one new term from ongoing dancers, but folks
   should be able to cope so long as you define it.
   4. The ultimate arbiters on this matter will be the dancers. In my prior
   life in business process work, I would witness long debates amongst the
   "architects" about what to call or name something and ultimately the users
   would just go ahead and call it what made sense to them - despite what the
   architects told them it should be. :)


On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 11:27 AM, John W Gintell <john at gintell.org> wrote:

> If the term is to be changed I think there should be agreement as to what
> the replacement is and not have a  variety of terms.  The health of many
> contra dance series is very dependent upon new dancers coming and having a
> good time so they return. There is a big vocabulary to learn and having it
> not be the same at successive or neighboring dances would add to the
> confusion.
>
>
>
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