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.
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.
As a male scientist, I approve of this constant reaffirmation of my masculinity.
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.
Nah, I’ll just stay in Austria. xD
Scientress*
Scientrix?
I think that’s the ones that try to trick you out of your soul via the power of science.
That would imply that a make scientist would be a scientor, which sounds equally cool!
Science-fighter
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
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.
this post is impressive in how it misses all the points
I guess it could have been, “sciencist”. Glad it’s not.
She has become the thing she hates.
She was an average fighter, but she was a BRILLIANT scientist
