Ad Astra Per Aspera

Two boys practicing their swordplay, Harlem, 1939–1940.

Though people associate it with very old science fiction, you won't see any occurrence of the term in its current meaning (a human inhabitant of the planet Earth, as opposed to an extraterrestrial) prior to 1949.

Actually, the term was first used by the Old Man himself, Robert E. Heinlein, in his 1949 novel "Red Planet" (a novel remembered for a weird digression where they explain the ethics of adults responsibly allowing children to carry loaded firearms). This all the way back when the Old Man was not quite so old yet, when RAH was actually a hotshot young lion looking to make a name for himself in the pages of the greatest scifi pulp of them all, Astounding Science Fiction under John W. Campbell, right at the dawn of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

Heinlein created the term Earthling and used it in a lot of his work instead of human because it was very important to distinguish in his stories between humans from Earth and, say, colonists of human stock from Mars, like in Podkayne of Mars. Hello, Mars used another interesting term with the same origin, where humans born in space referred to humans that lived their entire life on earth (semi-derogatorily) as "groundhogs."

The term caught on because Heinlein used it in his juveniles (what today we'd call "young adult" books), and to every generation prior to the Millennials, Heinlein was THE science fiction writer, much like how Agatha Christie is THE mystery author. It's a strange irony that, now that young adult books run the world, the young adult scifi author has mostly vanished from prominence.

Prior to 1949, scifi writers used a lot of other variant terms for humans from Earth. E.E. Smith, who Heinlein admired and listed as his single biggest influence (and from who Heinlein got the idea of space marines in power armor, an idea the Old Man used in Starship Troopers), used the term Tellurian to refer to humans from Earth in the Lensman novels, as Earth in his future era was known as Tellus, an erudite term for a god of Earth in Greek Myth used in Hamlet. Humanoids in the Lensman series were known as "Tellus-type lifeforms."

(You know, I feel like Tellurian for human and Tellus for Planet Earth should make a comeback.)

When I first saw this post go around, I was traveling, but I had something I wanted to say and I could never find it again.

Okay, so, this post isn’t wrong, but what the original gifset doesn’t take into account (though some of the commentary touches on it) is how incredibly situational swearing was in the 1940s.

So, yes, men swore a lot – around other guys, in certain contexts. But they were very heavily conditioned not to swear around women and kids.

I think this might be one of the big reasons why a lot of people my age and younger got the idea that people didn’t swear during the 1940s. Most of us fell into the “kid” or “female” categories, or both, and guys our grandparents’ age would never, ever say “fuck” around us. And those words weren’t usually used in media of the era for similar reasons, so we got the idea that people that age were very prim and polite, when it’s more that they were prim and polite around us.

I remember as a young woman walking in on groups of old blue-collar guys talking among themselves, with profanity flying freely, and then noticing me in the room and immediately clamming up and apologizing to me for swearing around me.

There’s a bit in the Douglas Bader biography I was reading a month or so ago that demonstrates this in a WWII context. According to the book, the squadron pilots swore freely in their radio chatter to each other in the field, to the amusement of the WAAFs (female service personnel) who were listening to the radio in an ops room as they moved counters around on maps (much like we see Peggy doing in TFA) and the embarrassment of their commander:

After awhile, to the regret of the Beauty Chorus [the WAAFs], Woodhall disconnected the loud-speaker in the Ops Room, feeling that some of the battle comments were too ripe even for the most sophisticated WAAFs. (“They laugh, you know,” he said, “but dammit I get so embarrassed.”)

… so, right, even in the middle of a war, pilots saying “fuck” over the radio was something the female staff had to be insulated from.

Say what you will about the baby boomers, but they largely demolished that wall between “swearing around men” and “swearing around women”. Most guys my dad’s age don’t do it anymore, at least not to that much of an extreme. By the time you get to my generation (I’m 40), people might swear or they might not, and they usually don’t swear around young kids, but swearing around men but not around women is just not a thing anyone does anymore. At least I don’t know anyone who does it specifically and consistently who’s not elderly.

It’s not really an individual-sexism thing, more of a socialization thing – sexist on a societal level, sure, but I don’t think Steve would balk at swearing around women, kids, or in a refined or professional social setting because he’s a sexist or a prude. It’s just something you didn’t do as a polite person. Like blowing your nose on the tablecloth in a fancy restaurant. I think he could and probably would unlearn that, but it’d take time.

So, to me, about half the examples up there work just fine (“now why the fuck would I do that” to Bucky – absolutely! Or “Is everything a fucking joke to you?” to Tony) and several jar horribly, because they’re not the right context (like the “there’s only one God ma'am” bit – noooo, you aren’t going to get “fuck” and “ma'am” in the same sentence! not for a Steve fresh from the 1940s! – or “we have our fucking orders” … in a polite, professional context like that, no). Steve would never. Or, I should say, someone from Steve’s culture – who tries in general to be a polite and respectful person, as Steve does – would never. Maybe after he’s had a few years to acclimatize to the more relaxed social climate surrounding swearing in the 21st century, but I think it’d take him awhile; he would sort of instinctively jerk himself back from doing it in all but the most relaxed sort of “palling around with your teammates” environment.

(Headcanon-wise, I could see Steve very quickly incorporating someone like Natasha into his mental schemata as “one of the guys” – not consciously, but on a subconscious level: like, he doesn’t hold back from swearing around her pretty quickly – but taking a LOT longer with someone like Wanda or Pepper.)

There's a version of this I see a lot in queer political arguments which I'm going to call Competing Ontological Needs. When two people need the same thing to be in two incompatible ontological categories. Or need the same thing to be logically impossible and not.

Now put like that obviously it's nonsense. Ontological categories are abstractions and where we draw their boundaries doesn't change the facts about the things in them. You can't *need* pluto to be a planet because no physical facts, either about pluto or about anything else, change depending on if pluto is "really" a planet or not.

But people sure do get really really scared and angry when they argue about what categories we should put different people and the things they do in! Obviously it makes sense to say "I categorize myself this way, and if you're not thinking about me with that same abstraction it means we don't understand eachother well which is sad". But the thing I see a lot is more concrete than that.

The common unspoken syllogism is "It is politically acceptable to do bad things to people if they are X, I don't want bad things to happen to me, so I need to not be an X". With variations like "if it was possible for Y to happen then it would be mandatory, Y is bad, thus I need to to not be possible for Y to happen". Or "Z is a good kind of thing to be, I dislike z, therefore z is not a kind of Z"

The fact it's unspoken sucks, because then you get into flaming rows where one party is making the totally pedestrian observation that someone has the characteristics of an X or that Y is totally possible, and the person they're talking to is reacting like this is a threat of immediate violence. Because if the unspoken syllogism were correct it totally would be! The prosecutor who argues that you're a murderer really is trying to commit literal violence against you by this argument! And in the ideal case is even morally correct to do so!

But often the unspoken syllogism doesn't work, or isn't universal, and so people get into arguments in which they need different things to be categorically true. And that sucks because settling arguments like that is even harder than settling ones about facts, and so often the apparent stakes are wildly different between participants.

It'd be really good if more of these could be defused by dismantling the syllogism. It doesn't need to be impossible for someone to change their sexuality, it just needs to not be mandatory. We don't need to argue about if this person is actually a woman, we can just stop doing bad things to her depending on which she is. We don't have to argue if AI can make "art" if we stop treating art as uniquely praiseworthy.

Especially when so many of the syllogisms are actually "in the 80s a political coalition made an argument that depends on X being Y, they won and did a really good thing, thus X must be Y". Which is extra insidious because if we take that as our argument then it's good to argue that X is Y *even if this is false and you know it's false*.