Experiment

[twincityhacker]

Further down on this posting is a quotation from an actual book with actual pages. I would like to ask you to guess the gender of the speaker in the quote.

The Quote: . . .it was rare for him to be up after ten at night, and he had invariably breakfasted and gone out before I rose in the morning.

Comments

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

I would guess male.

[msp-hacker.livejournal.com]

I guess Watson wasn't a woman after all. = )

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

I thought the hip assumption was that Watson was gay.

Seriously, I've seen it said that you can make an educated guess based on textual analysis, and there was even an LJ-reader thing that did that. I forget where. I scored marginally male on it, but it was close.

[msp-hacker.livejournal.com]

That's what the whole experiment was about. The author of the essay (http://www.hwslash.net/stout.html) proposed that the quote above was more likely to be said by women talking about her husbend and I wanted to test the theroy.

Sixty years or so a sherlockian comes along, looks at the same evidenve and comes away with the interpetatioin that while Watson had to be a man, that does not exclude that Holmes and Watson had a relationship.

Though the idea that you can tell someones gender from the way they write is an intersting idea.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

I'll have to look that up, because I'm sure I did it as a meme.

There are certain genderlectal things, spoken things that peg gender. Men drop the "g"s, making it "runnin'" rather than "running", far more often than women. That's the one example I remember from linguistics about 15 years ago. The top Google hits on "genderlect" are related to feminist theory, on how men use language to keep women down. Worthy topic for commentary, I suppose, but it doesn't tell me anything I can use as an author.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

I found a place with the meme, and that person accidentally walloped the web directory with all the meme stuff.