Away Team

Has anyone noticed how uncomfortable it is to work at someone else's puter-station? Even when it's a cosy space -- which it very frequently ISN'T -- it's sort of weird to step into someone else's hot seat. I'm sure it's awful for friends/guests who stay over at my abode in Nude Elly -- coz I am the original See No Dust home-owner. So there is a disgusting film of Delhi's finest atmospheric distillate coating every horizontal surface which isn't specifically being used (I mean, for instance, there's never a speck of dust on the actual keyboard of the puter, coz that's a high-traffic arena. But the monitor has a totally natural, organic, gaze-guard of silica particles). It only gets cleaned away when it has built up in dunes high enough that I actually feel threatened by them.

I've been long overdue with this post (i.e., a new post) despite several interesting events to discuss -- I saw the dogme film DOGVILLE recently, for instance and wanted to post about that -- and I travelled to Madras this Sunday -- and saw, in quick succession: THE INCREDIBLES (thrilling), MYSTIC RIVER (interesting but bad print) and David Cronenberg's CRASH (totally ridiculous -- so much so that I am reconsidering my opinion of his EXISTENZ, which I thoroughly appreciated at the time I saw it). But just this minute, having read the comment left behind by gt to my previous post, I am captiviated by the challenge he offers regarding ladybirds. As he points out, the name LADYBIRD must surely cause severe trauma to MALE LADYBIRDS -- and he encourages visitors to this site to think up further examples of such cruel, gender-insensitive nomenclature. Another example he offers is -- though he admits it's not ideal, coz it's a vegetable and hence, for English-speakers, lacks gender -- LADIES' FINGERS (whoaa -- I've forgotten whether that's LADY FINGERS or LADY'S FINGERS or ... ) otherwise known as OKRA in the New World.

So the challenge is to look for nouns, preferably in reference to living creatures, which express a gender bias. One that occurred to me right away was: SEVEN SISTERS -- don't the poor things ever have brothers? Also known as Jungle Babblers (maybe they're the brothers!). And of course, my favourite gender-insensitive word, but NOT an animal species is: MANHOLE. No way we can gender-sensitize that one ...

I'm not inclined to pay attention to words of the HISTORY/HERSTORY persuasion -- we're looking for words where there's a real and obvious problem with referring to the male or female individual belonging to a species which has been actually named to exclude one entire sex. Your move, gracious visitor ...

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