Cricket Going Woke

[enf]

It's on again. Changing the game for the good of us all, and going gender neutral.



Batsman to be changed to Batter. Batsmen to be changed to batters.....FFS

I might remind the Marylebone Cricket club, that these two terms at least are far from gender neutral...

Batter = to beat the wife.
Batters = the act of beating the wife.

Other terms are under consideration as well...

Maiden = to what? Whore?
Third Man = Third. So the threesome could be anyone. I suppose this is at least gender neutral.
Twelfth Man = Twelfth. She's a slut.
Nightwatchman = Nightwatcher. A pervert is still a pervert.

Sigh!!

[wotnot]

Had to happen eventually I guess ~ I suppose the positions 'silly mid on' & 'silly mid off' will be outlawed as well, due to their defamatory nature =)

You know what this reminds me of?...Monty Python's Flying Circus, series 4, episode 'Party Political Broadcast', last skit about the Batsmen of the Kalahari.

Why? Key word 'silly'

Got flagged on youtube for copyright the moment I tried to share the relevant 2minutes....not surprising (netflix & youtube selling it)... but you can read along...

I wonder what they're going to do with the collective nouns?....ie; 'men's cricket team' and 'women's cricket team'....and there's lots of team sports out there that use these terms....like women's soccer ...

[Uncle Fester]

I wonder what they will do with the feMALES in woMENS cricket?

[VroomVroom]

i could see the GayFL going the same way soon lol

[enf]

i could see the GayFL going the same way soon lol

They practically have already.....

Some more.....

Short Leg...not fair to cripples
Fine Leg....some women have two of them
Long On.....the girls will like that
Slips.......don't girls already wear those?
Square Leg..before the wooden leg is machined
Crease......she's fat
Stumps......Oscar Pistorius will be offended
Sweeper.....I'm married to one
Keeper......the one you marry
Runs........what this whole thing is giving me

Silly Point...what they are making with this whole f*cking excercise

[wotnot]

Cow corner becomes bovine bend?...one of my seppo buddies reckons we've yet to see the ultimate expression of 'woke', which in his mind is the inevitability of a woman becoming president of the US ..then the SHTF =)

[peteramjet]

It's on again. Changing the game for the good of us all, and going gender neutral.

Batsman to be changed to Batter. Batsmen to be changed to batters.....FFS

I’m against the whole ‘woke’ movement when gender is removed as a descriptor, ie removing male or female as terms to describe a male or female.

However, I see no issue with using a gender neutral term to describe a position that is, in fact, gender neutral. ‘Batsman’ being replaced with ‘batter’ is, in many ways, common sense to me.

[bob_m_54]

I’m against the whole ‘woke’ movement when gender is removed as a descriptor, ie removing male or female as terms to describe a male or female.

However, I see no issue with using a gender neutral term to describe a position that is, in fact, gender neutral. ‘Batsman’ being replaced with ‘batter’ is, in many ways, common sense to me.

I agree too. Sometimes it's just too confusing as well..... Like if you have a plug, where the individual contacts are sockets, that fits inside a socket, where the contacts are pins, is it male, female, bisexual or a hermaphrodite?

And when you have male pilots, that sit in the cockpit to fly the plane, why do they still call it a cockpit, when a female pilots fly??? All too confusing for me..

[enf]

..................

And when you have male pilots, that sit in the cockpit to fly the plane, why do they still call it a cockpit, when a female pilots fly??? All too confusing for me..

Pit?

[lsemmens]

Actually, if it is a cock pit, then surely there must be a person of child bearing variety involved, otherwise what is the point of calling it a pit for cocks........

[bob_m_54]

Pit?

sounds better than the alternative... c_ntpit..

[Uncle Fester]

Cockpit, joystick... I don't see the female gender being disadvantaged in aviation.

[wotnot]

And when you have male pilots, that sit in the cockpit to fly the plane, why do they still call it a cockpit, when a female pilots fly??? All too confusing for me..

Origins of the word 'cockpit' are old and varied, and while originally drawn from cock fighting, the modern use of the word, in relation to aircraft, is drawn from a different aspect than to that related to the sex of the birds used ... you can read this and figure out how far the word has come in over 500years -->

The etymologyof words changes and evolves with time, good recent example is 'horseless carriage' being now the colloquial 'car' -- does a car have a cockpit? Depends on the car, doesn't it -- airliners of course don't have cockpits, they have 'flight decks' (other planes are similarly disposed), and when one says 'joystick' it really depends on what you're referencing...ie; the 'joystick' in a F-86 Sabre jet should really be referred to as the 'control stick', but in modern aircraft the 'joystick' is electronic and usually referred to as the 'side-stick' or side control. The joystick connected to one's personal computer is always that, just a joystick, because it's not actually controlling a real aircraft, you're using it for 'fun' as it were --- this of course changes when the same joystick is plugged into a military computer controlling a flying drone or missile =)

However, this is digression ~ lets just pick on cricket, because AFAICT the word 'batter' goes back to the very beginning of the game, when it was a game played by children ...when the social bias was rich/poor, not a gender bias. Best I can figure it, the term 'batsmen' or 'batsman' is something that fell into colloquial use in the 19th century when cricket was adopted by the Gentry, and ever onward from that point during the period of cricket's popularization, very really something that only happened with the male version of the game (women's cricket co-existed with same, from the mid 1700's). In fact, I can remember from my youth playing school cricket, the words "Pad up! You're next batter in", which was a bit of a misnomer because I was more of a bowler, and a lousy batter....that's what our batsmen were for, and I suppose we only called them that 'coz they were blokes, not chicks...(and suddenly I think of 'BatGirl' & 'BatMan' =)

So I'm not sure here how much of this is truly 'woke', and how much of it is a 'correction' put in place due to meanderings in history, what happened in/with cricket during (particularly) the 20th century -- wherein in pretty much all countries that had adopted cricket as a national sport (think the commonwealth countries and those ex of Empire), the terms batsman/batsmen had become synonymous with men's cricket, but in terms of the game itself they are just batters, because the actual game of cricket is played by both sexes -- it's not a 'men only' game, never has been.

Now, I should point out I didn't read the article linked to in first post here - why? - due to the fact they wanted my googleID/email/whatever for the privilege of being able to read more than 1 para + 1 sentence, and that necessarily means they're more interested in *that* aspect of presentation, rather than presenting the journo article the webpage is hosting.. it's if so facto. Thus, I feed the search string 'why is cricket not using word batsman' into google, and I cherry pick 10 or so for a quick perusal to see what's blathering on the 'net about this, and the majority are balanced like this one -->

I've been sitting here trying to think what cricket had become, sociology-perspective kind of thoughts. First off the rank is that this is the most I've thought about cricket in something like 5 decades ; who remembers this?



I had one as a kid in the 60's, you always played it with your mates, never with girls who didn't want to play cricket in any form anyway....except of course for the occasional tomboy, who were of course always welcome =) This was a very boy realm, but you roll these kids games on a couple of decades, and they start to look like this;




Yep, that's the tomboy bottom right...lol...but don't let that distract from the fact all the other images are of boys and none of the plastic figurines have tits ..it's a detail a boy doesn't miss =)

What has this got to do with topic?...ramifications for game manufacturers ...haha... in my google search I didn't return any hits of how this would effect anyone in a practical sense, but I knew this one existed. Both of the games above are predominantly male orientated, and the term batsman is often used in accompanying game literature. These games live on of course into the modern day, but now they're got a real problem because the game design/makeup includes 1 x Trigger Action Batsman, and even if they change that to 'batter', it's still the figure of a bloke and be sure to watch the ad -->

Now that they've got the nomenclature all sorted out, how long will it take companies like this to develop gender neutral plastic figurines, or the game includes 2 x Trigger Action Batters (one with tits, one without)...not that I'd dwelling on tits, but there's only so many ways to visually represent gender with plastic figures...but then of course there'd be outcry your plastic figures are sexist because they are male/female stereo-types, so you may as well throw it away and develop a video game using VR technology, where the player has a dropdown menu with multiple options to best describe the sexual preferences used by the game when generating game characters.

Didn't Roy & HG cover this years ago on the Js, positing the only real answer to sexual equality in cricket, was to have mixed teams of both men & women all playing the game naked? =)

[enf]

Oh jeeez...had both of those games....memories...

[bob_m_54]

Origins of the word 'cockpit' are old and varied, and while originally drawn from cock fighting, the modern use of the word, in relation to aircraft, is drawn from a different aspect than to that related to the sex of the birds used ... you can read this and figure out how far the word has come in over 500years -->

The etymologyof words changes and evolves with time, good recent example is 'horseless carriage' being now the colloquial 'car' -- does a car have a cockpit? Depends on the car, doesn't it -- airliners of course don't have cockpits, they have 'flight decks' (other planes are similarly disposed), and when one says 'joystick' it really depends on what you're referencing...ie; the 'joystick' in a F-86 Sabre jet should really be referred to as the 'control stick', but in modern aircraft the 'joystick' is electronic and usually referred to as the 'side-stick' or side control. The joystick connected to one's personal computer is always that, just a joystick, because it's not actually controlling a real aircraft, you're using it for 'fun' as it were --- this of course changes when the same joystick is plugged into a military computer controlling a flying drone or missile =)

-------------------------------------------- snip -----------------------------------------------

I like the adapted from the coxswains seat version better..
And you are correct, you never call the control stick a joystick, the same as you never call an aeroplane a plane ;-).. but yes, we digress..