Back to the terms, I wanted to relate an experiment I did with the terms, because I found something different from what I was told I would find. I'm not advocating a re-opening of the terms can of worms, but I think the experiment sheds some light on why we think as we do about the terms, and on how dancers learn.
But first, a way-back reminder. When I started dancing in the late 1980s, it was explained to me that it was ok to dance the other role, and I sometimes did, really enjoyed it, and became a much better dancer. Callers were taking the revolutionary step of not calling "men" and "women" but rather using "ladies" and "gents", to signal that switching roles was ok, since nobody referred to themselves as a "lady" or a "gent" in casual conversation. I guess that didn't stick, and now we have to do it again!
Ok, the experiment. I started calling "for real" in summer 2022 to a group of nearly all newbies in Orlando. I have always had a hard time with "larks" and "robins", as I hear the start of "lark" the same as the start of "ladies", think, that's not me, and then realize two beats later that it is me and I'm late. When I am on the ball, I hear "lark" and think, "Lark starts with 'L', which means left. Am I on the left? No..yes! Yes! I'm a lark". Now, I'm four beats late. What I really wanted to hear was, "left", not "lark". I talked about it with some pretty famous callers, who said it wouldn't work, as people would get confused with the directionals given for allemandes and such.
Knowing a bit about how the brain processes language in a learning setting, I thought this through and decided it shouldn't be a problem if I consistently used dancer-action-direction (say, "Rights allemande left," not, "Left allemande, rights"). So, I started teaching that way (straight substitution for gents and ladies, not positional calling). It worked like a charm. Everyone understood it and did it. The hardest part was that some people don't know their left from their right, but in that case "larks" and "robins" get even worse, because they still boil down to that, after the extra step of going from "lark" to "left". Newbies progressed to intermediates pretty quickly. I felt quite vindicated.
Except.
Except that some experienced dancers got really messed up by "lefts" and "rights" and danced worse than when they first started with "larks" and "robins". Much worse. Why would the newbies dance anything better than the experienced dancers? After asking around a bit, I determined that, no matter what terms you use, you will eventually identify intuitively with a label - gent, left, lark or lady, right, robin, it doesn't matter - and won't go through the computation that takes 2-4 beats to derive me or not-me from a term. BUT, the experienced dancers had already done this for "left" and "right" in a different way, assigning those words exclusively to directionals. When I said, "Lefts allemande right", their left hand was up and they were already shifting weight to enter a left allemande when seemingly I countermanded it and they realized that I meant, what? what did he say? and they're late while they're thinking it through logically. And they're unhappy, because, by taking them out of their intuition, I had made them newbies. Worse, in a sense, because they had to UNLEARN something for which they had a firm intuition and years of practice, which is the hardest of all mental tasks.
"Lefts" and "rights" are great terms for anyone but an experienced dancer. Not so much for them. The famous callers were right, for experienced dancers, who are the majority.
So, I'm now calling "larks" and "robins". And understanding better how VHS clobbered Beta...
Interestingly enough, my lefts-rights dancers are picking up larks-robins pretty fast. There is nothing for them to unlearn.
--jh--