Hey can you backwards engineer some gender neutral version of sir/ma'am
I can! And I will. But Iâm going to walk you through it because you guys can do this too. I have no special skills other than having taken Latin 20 years ago. :DÂ
Bit of a plug first:Â this is a technique that I am using to de-gender a number of royal ranks in my books -- for example, the retired king has declared his nonbinary partner âCaezâ, shortened from Caesar, to replace king/queen. In a book not yet published, his granddaughter is offered prince, princess, or the gender-neutral princeps when sheâs adopted, and although she identifies as female, she chooses princeps because she doesnât like the word princess. Ledan came about because I was trying to decide what one character, a duke known for his irreverence, might call a person at the rank of lord or lady if he wanted to make fun of himself a bit for not knowing their gender.
Okay, now that Iâve got the obligatory âHey look, queer romance novelsâ out of the way, letâs dive in...Â
So, what you want to know is the origins of the words Sir and Madam. With Lord and Lady they came from the same general place -- Old English derived from the Germanic -- so it was easy to just go âBread watcher? Bread maker? Sure letâs find something else you can do with breadâ and go from there. This will not always be the case, and it isnât here, but that makes things extra-interesting.
What youâre going to do is go to Wiktionary.org and search the terms you want to work backward from. In this case we want to search Sir, and we also want to search Madam, which is what Maâam comes from.Â
On the page for Sir, we click âetymologyâ under English or scroll down to it, and we get the history of the word. How far back you go in this history can vary by what kind of word youâd like to use. In this case we know the history goes sir > sire > French Sire (master, sir, lord) > Latin senior (elder) > Latin Senex (old). I like to go all the way back to the Latin, but letâs hold that thought.Â
Now that we have Sir identified, weâll check out Madam, from which we get the history maâam > madam > madame > Old French madame (âmyâ and âladyâ) > post-classical Latin mea domina, which also means generally âmy ladyâ although it has a more specific meaning weâll get to shortly.Â
So we have a couple of options!Â
We can take âSenexâ which is more closely related to the masculine âSirâ but is in itself generally neutral, and come up with âSenâ, which has no meaning in Latin on its own but weâre not speaking Latin, weâre speaking English, which shortens everything anyway.Â
We can also look at âma dominaâ and take that apart -- domina and dominus concern the home, the physical building, using the same root we get âdomicileâ and âdomainâ. So you could click through from domina to dominus to domus, and go with âma domusâ, since domus has connotations of household, family, etc. Ma Domus might shorten to Mâus. It could also shorten to âmaâdoâ, but thatâs two syllables and I like to retain the syllable count of the original words. And also Mâus or even just Mus sounds like youâre saying Moose. Which, Moose is a pretty cool name to call a nonbinary friend, but may be taken amiss by strangers. It strikes me that Mâus could be used as a term of respect specifically for someone in your family -- a parent or grandparent, a cousin or zaza. Thereâs a hint of familiarity there.Â
We could go one step further and look at the implications of the word origins -- both are addressing a superior in rank, but âsirâ emphasizes age, while âmaâamâ emphasizes economic power. Now, if we want to break away from both of those we could decide that instead we want to respect a different kind of power -- say, the power of a teacher we trust and look up to. Wiktionary tells us that teacher derives from the verb âteachâ, and at the etymology of teach we find several variants including techen, taecan, taikijan, taikijana, and deyk (as a prefix). I rather like Deyk, because a) it shortens nicely to Dey, b) if youâre talking to someone you respect itâs sincere but if youâre talking to someone you donât respect itâs easily sarcastic, and c) if youâre talking to someone you donât respect you can throw a little k in, so that it sounds like youâre calling them Dey but youâre actually calling them Dick.Â
 Of these options I really do prefer Sen. It sounds nice, itâs not a homophone for anything weird, and it implies respect for the personâs experience. If I were writing a novel with a nonbinary honorific I might go with Dey just because thereâs more scope for wordplay and nuance, but in actual life I think Senâs quite nice.Â
So yeah itâs fun and interesting and you get to learn the weird-ass histories of weird-ass words. I encourage everyone to make their own!Â
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End of year mathblr asks: 5, 11, 13 (for 13 feel free to include class presentations and/or explanatory writing you've done and enjoyed)
5. What kind of math will you be working on next year?
11. Can you share a favourite mathblr post?
13. Were there any funny moments in a math talk/lecture/tutorial you gave this year? (feel free not to answer if this is too emberassing)
5. not sure. i want to do some computational geometry, but this year generally had too much math for me to comfortably handle. so, the next year is gonna have less math :)
11. oh no. i have such a bad memory for those things! let's just randomly pick this one
13. i recently had to include [this image] in a formally styled latex document, because it was 30 minutes away from our deadline 0_0 i looked so funny when printed out :3
and it turned out this is the wrong reduction to use for this problem :(
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Today this side blog surpassed my main blog in follower count: 265 to 264. I'm really excited. This blog is younger than my main, but it's so much better. Thanks for hanging out with me, you guys!