As cool as that story is, it’s not correct. Taken from https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/71/1/46/819012/Mary-Somerville-s-vision-of-scienceThe-Scottish
“Mary Somerville’s iconic status is often summed up by stating that William Whewell, in his review of her book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, hailed her as the first “scientist.” But almost exactly the opposite was the case. Nowhere did Whewell or anyone else in her lifetime ever call Somerville a scientist, nor is it a word, so far as we know, that she ever used herself. By our current understanding of the term, Somerville can certainly be called a scientist, but for her contemporaries she belonged to a higher and more profound category entirely.”
Nice, a Lemmy post of a picture of a Tumblr post citing reddit for a completely bogus fact. We truly are using all of our brains these days.
Running wasn’t invented until the late 15th century, when Thomas Running tried to walk twice at the same time!
What do you mean. Random internet screenshots are among the most reputable source. I’m even citing this post in a scientific work right now.
It seems to be kinda true but not really? The term was coined by someone else to describe her apparently?
“I will now be regressing the equality she attempted to create in an attempt to be petty.”
I need to take a psychology class because I just can’t fucking understand people.
Just as Lemmy’s full of right-wing authoritarians preaching communism, it’s also full of sexist assholes preaching feminism. I hope that one day the Fediverse will be mainstream enough that we’ll get enough reasonable people to downvote this trash into oblivion, but we don’t seem to be getting any closer to that.
do you think the responder is serious. do you.
Sadly, I’ve seen more absurd comments be said with complete seriousness. I wish it weren’t hard to tell.
This is cool and all but I feel like “Woman of Science” was the obvious workaround to their problem.
It’s obvious because the woman “factoid” origin is completely made up and untrue.
Given the time she lived in, I guess she didn’t want to make it too obvious that she was a woman
Leave it to women, am I right?
a womanist doesn’t sound right
As a male scientist, I approve of this constant reaffirmation of my masculinity.
I dunno. “Man of science” has a really nice ring to it. (“Woman of Science” too.)
I agree! They both sound very prestigious.
They sound like they’re probably working on some rayguns or tesla coils.
Come to Germany then.
German uses generic masculine grammatical gender and the state of Bavaria just banned the practice of “Gendern”, meaning use both forms (male and female).
So you’d have to be referred to as male pretty much always.
They didn’t ban the usage of both forms, they banned the usage of new forms, that try to combine masculine and feminine into a gender-neutral form, in administrative texts.
deleted by creator
Yes and no, language is how it’s used, not necessarily the rules someone once wrote down. The problem is if you have a generic form and you start using a different form for women the generic form stops being generic. Eventually everyone will settle on some new generic form or resurrect some old form and we can move on to other problems.
What? How can this be true? “The generic masculine is gender-neutral”? You see where you made a mistake? German and most other languages revolve around a pretty strong gender hierarchy and patriarchy. So no, its default is definitely not gender neutral! I would be in favor of a true neutral. But we would have to come up with a new form.
Yes, it is. It’s a grammatical construct. When someone said “alle Schüler” in the year 2000, they meant all students regardless of their genders. If some meant explicitly male students they’d have said “alle männlichen Schüler” for clarity.
Nope, seeing men as the default and considering everyone else as a secondary option is already a discrimination of the latter. I know that “alle Schüler” is referring to everyone in class, but it is not gender neutral. It assumes male students if not specified otherwise.
It seems like you don’t acknowledge the existence of patriarchal violence or power. A discussion is probably futile in this case because our value systems are fundamentally different.
Obviously partriarchies exist and they probably originated in the grammatical masculine as the default.
But I doubt that patriarchal power or even violence is a systemic issue in Germany today and I think addressing it via centrally trying to change the language is laughable.
Let’s take Turkey for example: Turkish is gender neutral, there is no grammatical gender. How did that help equal rights?
Nah, I’ll just stay in Austria. xD
So you’re a man of science
Can I feel your bicep?
Sadly, no. My chest musculature is so enoumous that it completely envelops me. Kind of impractical in the lab sometimes, but that’s the things you do for more testosterone.
Nice username btw. xD
Thank you
This has to be bait or something. The fake fact aside, who would be against gendered professions and simultaneously advocating to gender a profession?
Also, why couldn’t they call her a “woman of science?”
also, the term for it was literally in the post, man of science, so male scientist is basically male man of science
I hereby declare meself an alpha male man of sciences.
Not to be confused with the dude who read your Zoobooks and Nat Geo magazines while on his way to leave them in your mailbox.
The male mail man of science.
A bilingual person would to a certain extent. I’ve noticed a tendency of English-speaking societies to gradually eliminate the gender from professions, while the languages with grammatical gender, like Russian or German, tend to incorporate previously missing feminine suffixes to the words that previously were male-gendered only.
Though your question (a rhetorical one I guess) regards English only, I suppose, and then yes, the combination is weird.
edit: from what I gather, German is already content with the use of “-in” suffix, so not much change needed, except the push for the use of a “gender gap” or “gender asterisk” (Genderstern) for language to be more inclusive when using plurals [looks extremely clunky to me, but I get the spirit]. In Russian, however, even the suffixes meet significant resistance, both from society and, especially, government, to the point that feminitives are considered “LGBT propaganda”, and since “LGBT is an extremist organisation”, that is extremism apparently. Anyway, “gender gaps” (usually as underscores) are also used in more “left” (for lack of a better label) communities, but are absolutely not accepted and misunderstood be the wider audience.
Yeah there is a lot of discussion about it in Germany but generally lawyers, professors, and doctors had to fight for their feminine terminology to exist so any attempt to take it away now would be met with severe backlash.
https://mybookjoy.com/2023/06/14/word-origins-is-scientist-a-womanly-word/
This person did a good write up of this claim
Spoiler alert. The social media “fact” is completely made up.
Behind many famous scientists there was a great woman whose work earned them the Nobel Prize.
Scientress*
Scientrix?
I think that’s the ones that try to trick you out of your soul via the power of science.
Science-fighter
I thought it was him, William Whewell, in response to an almost rant from Samuel Taylor Coleridge about “natural philosophers” (today’s scientists) not deserving to be called “philosophers”.
I just googled it and found:
Coleridge stood and insisted that men of science in the modern day should not be referred to as philosophers since they were typically digging, observing, mixing or electrifying—that is, they were empirical men of experimentation and not philosophers of ideas.
[…]
There was much grumbling among those in attendance, when Whewell masterfully suggested that in “analogy with artist we form scientist.” Curiously this almost perfect linguistic accommodation of workmanship and inspiration, of the artisanal and the contemplative, of the everyday and the universal –was not readily accepted.
Yeah, that was the story I’d heard.
Another source says:
Coleridge declared that although he was a true philosopher, the term philosopher should not be applied to the association’s members. William Whewell responded by coining the word scientist on the spot. He suggested
by analogy with artist, we may form scientist.
It’s funny because nobody remembers S. T. Coleridge as a philosopher but only as a poet. I’ve read that his philosophical writings were like an eccentric and almost immature version of German idealism. The thing that haunts me is that famous F. Schelling is well read but often misunderstood, so if they both were part of the romantic movement and they were both close to idealism, it could be that they both suffer the same fate.
Anyway, I digressed. That was the story I knew. Basically, a gatekeeping poet separated philosophers and natural philosophers.
It’s even curious because there are rumours about men like Coleridge being “half-mad”, and recently there have been studies on it. It would be ridiculous (just as history tends to be) if an old mad poet had divided these branches of knowledge on a fit of bad moods.
Is your point that this source doesn’t back up the Mary Somerville etymology or just an FYI?
Either way, the quote taught me about the word sciolist - a person who pretends to be knowledgeable and well informed so thanks.
Example A.
It’s Man of Science, not male scientist. It’s right there in the post.
“Man of science” sounds so much cooler than “scientist”. Such a shame it’s not used anymore
this post is impressive in how it misses all the points
I guess it could have been, “sciencist”. Glad it’s not.
