Fruit

back then i made a bunch of these but by now i lost the pic and dont know how to find the original post anymore

so anyway here is the diagram for anyone else who is interested!!

this requires pretty big carboard pieces, if you have a really big box or something you can make it from one piece, but if you don't, you can also just make each of the pieces individually and then tape them together

and then in the end you put it together like this!!

and then when you make a bunch you can put them all next to each other and stack your books like crazy

the op linked the study in the replies & i’ve been skimming it & it’s actually rlly rlly interesting to think abt

My favorite example, beyond the obvious ones like lord/lady, waiter/waitress, steward/stewardess, is housekeeper, which is now the more acceptable term for a maid, when maid, of course, just means "woman" and keeper is masculine, would be keepster or keepess but (to my knowledge) neither were used historically because, well, keeping wasn't something women got to do!

Likewise, waitress has fallen out of favor for host or server, which are also both gendered terms. (hostess or serving girl, respectively. Servant is also gendered, maidservant and servantess were used)

There's been a concerted push with a lot of these to phase out the feminine variants of these words and just treat the masculine variants as neutral, or find neutral alternatives like fireman -> firefighter (even though fighter is also gendered) because the feminine variants are seen as inherently lesser, which, yeah that's how women are seen.

There is a line you have to draw somewhere of "okay let's just treat this and below as gender neutral because, frankly, most words that just mean "person" mean "man" historically because women weren't (and still largely aren't) considered people, and otherwise we're going to shred the whole English language" and I get that.

BUT. I think a lot of folks draw that line at the start and insist that man/guy/dude/bro can be gender-neutral which is obvious stupid. And I think it's always worth having this investigation and questioning how we speak, it shapes how we think about worlds and people real and fictional.