1 Jan
2013
1 Jan
'13
7:52 p.m.
On 12/30/2012 7:47 PM, William Loving wrote:
There have been many interesting as well as highly
amusing suggestions
but there is a consensus I think that agrees on the need for
something:
1. Matches the one/two syllable form of gents/ladies, men/women, etc.
2. Sounds distinctly different for easy recognition
3. References Left and Right (for left-hand person and right hand person)
4. Is gender and connotatively neutral without a lot of referential baggage
So far, I think the best one we've come up with so far is "Port/Starboard",
which seems to meet all those requirements.
I disagree with the need to have the new terms reference the left and
right positions. The words "gents and ladies" make no reference to
where those characters are at any given moment, for example, yet they
seem to have served pretty well for the last few hundred years.
Directional terms are already working pretty hard in dance instruction,
so it seems unwise to me to make those terms carry any more luggage than
they already have to. I saw a Scottish dance group teaching a session
for festival-goers a few years ago and they divided their random crowd
of tourists into longways sets and then designated the lines "A and B".
It's a little dry, but it worked. I'm not recommending that as the
new paradigm. Simply putting it out there as a non-left/right example
that was effective.
Kalia