(no subject)

[jack]

Simon and I were discussing, amongst other things, a term for non-mutants in X-Men.

(If you don't know, in X-Men, there's an X-gene which gives people various invariable useful if often inconvenient special powers. These people are called Mutants, and everyone else is referred to as Human by exclusion, although human would by any sane definition include both as well.)

Peter won, in my opinion, with a suggestion in the pub last night, "Wild type" which in biology means "members of a species not having interesting mutations" (very roughly, someone give a more precise definition below).

But it got me thinking. What do the following terms all have in common:

Human (as in non-mutant)
Carnivore/Omnivore (as in non-vegetarian)
Neurotypical (as in non-autistic)
Heteronormative
Cis (as opposed to trans- or trans-gender)
Atheist

They all define everyone apart from members of a specific group. And hence don't really have any cohesion within themselves. And so the terms can be used literally, but most are generally used with either a grin or a sneer, admitting non-X doesn't just mean non-X, but "what I find annoying about non-X people, particularly their opinions of X people" and "lets see how they like being labelled". To magneto, human is an insult.

I don't know if it's relevant, but I think no-one ever means vegans when they say "non-vegetarians" :) (So a term meaning sometimes-meat-eating is actually more accurate.)

"Wild type", apart from sounding a hell of a lot cooler than "human" and lacking existing prejudice, seems to do a nice job of describing a default state, without implying anything about it as a whole. Of course, it's probably too obscure a term to catch on, but I like it.

I know sometimes it can be difficult to decide which is a group and which isn't. For instance, traditionally religion-X might consider people not of religion X to have more in common than not (and to some extent be right, if religion X is true). But I was enchanted by the analogy between atheist and neurotypical, etc. I'm sure it says something (though I'm not yet sure what).

Comments

[cornute.livejournal.com]

I think, interestingly, that a term for "Members of large group A who are NOT members of subgroup X" is a big step in acceptance for subgroup X.

Why? Because the first step in getting non-X to deal with you is getting them to admit you exist.

A comparison that may show a bit more of what I'm thinking:

--If you were to ask a lot of hetero people what sexual orientation they were, almost all of them would say "heterosexual." Very few people see the labels "heterosexual" and "homosexual" (and "bisexual") as being forced in some way. Now, I'm not saying that all those hetero people think it's okay NOT to be hetero. They may think that non-straightness is morally wrong, icky or gross, or just plain unfair (because the lesbians never come over to THEIR house to fix the computer and get naked). However, they admit it exists and they are all right with calling themselves something that clearly labels them as another kind of person than that.

--However, if you were to ask a bunch of cisgendered people what their combination of sex and gender was called, assuming you stopped to explain it to the ones who weren't familiar with the idea, a good many of them would balk at labeling themselves "cisgendered." Not, mind you, because they think of themselves as trans, or some kind of gender rebel who transcends the oppressive gender hierarchy or whatever, but because they don't think of being transgendered as REAL, and thus they don't need a word for not-transgendered. For people who think that, it's like having to state your species on the driver's license; of course I'm H. sap. sap. you buffoon! What am I going to be, a Vulcan? a dolphin?

I think the problem that people have when they make a not-X term is that people aren't equidistant. "Neurotypical" is a very nice term, except that it doesn't apply to someone who's had a stroke or taken a railroad spike through the head, even if they aren't autistic. "Heterosexual privilege" doesn't apply so much if you're a black man dating a white woman at certain times and places. People don't really allow for that, and that's where the problem with these sorts of terms comes in.

[simont]

Isn't "heteronormative" the odd one out of that list? It doesn't describe a group of people; it describes a dismissive attitude towards anyone outside a group of people.

I think I would generally consider the literal meaning of "vegetarian" to simply mean "unwilling to eat meat". Thus, literally speaking, "vegan" is a subclass: all vegans are vegetarians, it's just that that's not all they are. That's why "non-vegetarian" unambiguously describes people who do eat meat. The only reason I would assume that someone described solely as "vegetarian" doesn't go as far as being vegan is by deduction from things not said: if the person being described were vegan, the person doing the describing would (in most contexts) have said so! The same kind of non-literal usage which is played upon by the joke "how many months have 28 days?". (This is such a common concept, actually, that there must surely be a well-known term for it in linguistics.)

For nonmutants in the X-Men universe, I still like "original". It permits both sides to consider themselves superior if they want to: an original can mentally append "and best" to the word, whereas a mutant can savour the thought of being new and improved. The trouble with "wild type", for me, is that it's too obscure: it lacks existing prejudice, but (to someone, like me, outside the field in which it's specialist jargon) it also lacks any existing meaning whatsoever. You might as well decide that nonmutants would be referred to as "flibblywibblies".

[ravingglory.livejournal.com]

Well I like wild type. But I've used it to talk about flies for a while. (But I find the idea of single gene being responsible for such vartiy of traits unlikely. I mean even if its just developmental on switch for other genes, where did the other genes come form?)

On the other hand I really don't think Atheist belongs on the list. However I might use the word differently than you. I use it to mean, someone who actively disbelieves in the supernatural, which isn't default state, because you have to know about the supernatural to disbelieve in it.

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

They all define everyone apart from members of a specific group.

For the purposes of this, can I just invent a couple of terms?

Inclusive semantics: when a word describes the group X belongs to.
Exclusive semantics: when a word describes the group X is ezxcluded from (thereby categorising X specifically as 'not a member of the group').

There's surely a difference between words whose semantics was obviously originally intended to be exclusive (e.g. 'atheist' with its alpha privative construction), and ones that acquired exclusive semantics at a later stage (AFAIK 'carnivore' meaning specifically 'not vegetarian' is a very recent development).

But I do think the trend is interesting. I think it's more marked when the alternatives for X are *not* binary (and mutually exclusive) though. Because if they are binary (I was going to say male vs. female would be a good example, but I spent some of this morning reading an article about a book about a hermaphrodite, thus making me more aware than usual of the not necessarily binaryness of gender), then expressing one is necessarily also necessarily expressing exclusion of the other.

Something like 'neurotyprical' would be a good example of the not binary set, I guess - becase you could be non-neurotypical in several different ways.

But the way such a word is constructed is often quite predictable. E.g. if you add the increasingly productive suffix -typical to a word (or stem) then you're saying that the thing described by the word does not possess any of e.g. a known set of defects. Or, more commonly, the not possessing of something might be expressed by prefixes such as a- or un- or in- or non-. It's almost more interesting when the word isn't contructed like this but just happens to be a completely independent invention that the speakers of the language deemed necessary because the sentiment is not one you could live without possessing :)

This reminds me of QI last night (an old one) - there's a sort of second generation rhyming slang word 'listerine' that means 'someone who hates Americans' - because the rhyming slang for American is 'septic' (septic tank = yank), so if you hate Amnericans you're anti-septic... :)