"Where have you been?" he demanded.
"Making some coffee," said Arthur, still wearing his very placid face. He had long ago realized that the only way of being in Ford's company successfully was to keep a large stock of very placid faces and wear them at all times.
From So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish
Tonight, at the Roadhouse:
Guest, with menu open: So, your Rattlesnake Bites... are they real rattlesnakes?
Me, with placid face secured: No, they're made with cheese and jalapeño peppers.
Guest, obviously disappointed and confused: Oh. Well, if it's not real rattlesnake, I guess we'll just take a Cactus Blossom.
Me, not out loud: That's not actually a cactus; it's made out of an onion.
Placid faces = Useful inventions.
Oh, and while I wouldn't expect anything called The Gender Genie to disappoint me, playing with it was tons of fun and even reasonably accurate.
6 comments:
The Gender Genie did a funny thing for me. Anything recent and reflective told me I was a woman and those essays and other assignments I wrote at Houghton were overwhelmingly male in nature. Very funny!
As soon as I read your post, I hypothesized that anything I write as "me" would be considered female, but that the memos to the file I write for work would be considered male. After tweaking a memo I'd written for work (to take out all identifiable references to my firm or the client), I ran it through the calculator, and it came out overwhelmingly male. My blog entries were female.
This intrigues me, and I think I know why it is: my auditorspeak is made to sound more professional, and the more professional-sounding indicators are male. thoughts?
From BookBlog
They discovered that "women are apparently far more likely than men to use personal pronouns -- 'I,' 'you' and 'she' especially. Men, on the other hand, prefer so-called determiners -- 'a,' 'the,' 'that,' 'these' -- along with numbers and quantifiers like ''more'' and 'some.'"
And from a different page
...a woman author whose passage comes up with a male result is seen by Koppel and Argamon's algorithm as having a masculine quality to her writing because she's writing more about specific things (using keywords like "the," "a," "some," numbers, and "it") than connections (using keywords like "with," possessives, possessive pronouns, "for," and "not").
So, yeah. I think that professional-speak is less about connections and more about specific references. There's probably something deep here about male privilege encoded in language, but I'm too tired to flesh it out.
yes, that's what i was thinking, but i was even less able to articulate it ;)
Great post, Julie. Hard to believe anyone could start with Douglas Adams and get more entertaining, but you've done it...
Were these hapless clients of yours actually expecting rattlesnake meat? Were they really taking the name of the item literally, I would think they would be expecting you to bring them a basket full of the snakes themselves, so they could be bitten ...
And I guess I should be even less secure than I am in my masculinity. The Gender Genie rates a recent paper on the authority of Scripture as male, but my spiritual autobiography from last year gets tagged as female. Interestingly (probably only to me), I also tried the autobio in pieces: the first six pages describing my youth are male, the next six or so on my angst-filled high-school and young-adult years are female, and the last third is male again. And most of the last few posts from the ill-fated Pizza King Watch are male, except for this one.
But do men really use "is" and "the" more often than women? It would seem pretty difficult to write anything at all in English-- reflective or otherwise-- without words like that.
Hm, Brian, I think tonight's shift might be spent designing just such a basket of snakes. Good times will ensue for all, or at least for me.
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