1899 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



si 



grammai iaus of the language — and Hasty figures that 

 you will be defeated, ought to be if you are not. 



What are the absolute facts of ihe case? The work- 

 er (barring a few exceptional ones) is anatomically a 

 female, but functionally a neuter. If we say ' he " we 

 contradict the anatomical truth. If we say " she " we 

 contradict the functional truth. Can't help doing one 

 or t'other. Which, then, is the less important aspect 

 of the two, that we may contradict that ? I think that 

 we must say that the anatomical aspect is usually less 

 important. The strictly logical result would be the 

 use of neuter pronouns; but neuter pronouns, used of 

 living things, gives a stiffness to our disc urse which 

 is not agreeable. Both speaker and heaier feel better 

 when the pronouns are thrown into the masculine, 

 which is perfectly admissible. Though you paint an 

 inch thick you can't get rid of the ugly fact that read- 

 ers will feel that sex must be important in some way 

 if feminine pronouns, in non- figurative discourse, are 

 used of an insect ; and that is really the most impor- 

 tant consideration we have to meet in the case. Tell 

 you what ails you, brethren. Y< u ate proud of know- 

 ing more about the bee's gender than the laity do ; 

 and therefore you must needs be airing your wisdom 

 before them, just as callow preachers air their Hebrew. 



[This was submitted to Mr. Hasty, who 

 replies in his own inimitable way : — Ed.] 



Is that you, Dr. Miller, gnawing at the toes 

 of my cold corpse in the coffin of the " Con- 

 densed View " ? No more than I expected — 

 and I suppose I must wake up enough to kick 

 a little. 



Never yet heard a worker bee called " he " 

 in household usage? This declaration is sim- 

 ply amazing — almost too amazing to reply to. 

 Are we to suppose that, whenever you are in a 

 household other than your own, you do all the 

 talking, and never hear anybody say any thing? 

 (When dead folks do kick they don't kick 

 politely. ) I simply wish to appeal to all ob- 

 servant people concerning the speech of our 

 ordinary American folks (bee-keepers exclud- 

 ed), if with them a bee is not " he " a million 

 times where it isn't she once — and at least 

 twice as often as " it." The most prominent 

 characteristic of the bee, as impressing chil- 

 dren and common folks, is its disposition to 

 give chase, and to sting. It thus gets itself 

 on the same footing as the mosquito — an insect 

 which apiarian households have no special 

 kink in regard to. Now, when a man slaps 

 at a mosquito and kills the game (almost 

 breaking his own skull to do it) he gleefully 

 shouts, " I've got him /" — very rarely indeed, 

 "I've got it;" never known to be, ''I've got 

 her." Manifestly the speech would be the 

 same if a bee instead of a mosquito were the 

 assailant. And please notice how completely 

 the gender is contradicted in the example 

 given If I am right the mosquito has no 

 neuter form, and the male seldom or never 

 bites. "She" does all the biting, and "he" 

 gets all the maledictions. 



What the doctor says about flies and other 

 insects seems to me to be very wild also. Yet 

 if I should quote actual examples of such 

 speech he stands ready to claim that some 

 crank of an uncle, or some queer-spoken for- 

 eigner of a hired man, had corrupted the 

 speech of that particular household — won't go 

 at it in that way. There are certain bits of 

 immortal writing which reflect the American 

 household speech, and I'll go for them — not as 

 literature particularly, but as evidence of what 

 our houFehold usage really is. One of the fore- 

 most of these home gems is Theodore Tilton's — 



Baby bye, 

 Heie's a fly. 

 Let us watch him, jou and I, 



and so on to the end, stuffed full of masculine 

 pronouns. Note again : 



" Will you walk into my parlor?" said a spider to a fly. 



Then up /if springs; but both hit wings 



Were in the web caught fast. 



Note again from " The Ant and the Cricket:" 



Then away he went to a miserly art, 



To see if to keep him alive lie would grant. 



Here both ant and cricket are called " he," 

 and the ant is a neuter, or pseudo-female, just 

 like the bee. Note also the beautiful oriental 

 story of Solomon and the king of the ants, and 

 its pronouns. 



I think I have heard that, among the prom- 

 inent languages of the world (ancient and 

 modern included) English is the only one 

 that pretends to hold out for literal accuracy 

 in the matter of gender, all the rest having 

 idealized their genders almost entirely. And 

 English, I have been trying to show, has gone 

 a long distance in the same direction, or at 

 least in the direction of optionalism, and is 

 now holding out for only so much of literal 

 accuracy on this point as clearness of mean- 

 ing requires. No live language can stand 

 still ; and no language can easily resist the 

 influence of other tongues round about it. 

 Our little squad of bee-writers are trying to 

 reform backward, in a direction counter to a 

 powerful tide, when they want an insect which 

 isn't a female, after all, called "she." 



This alleged reform, if it could be success- 

 fully inflicted on the language, would at once 

 create an urgent need for some other pronoun 

 than " she " to express the real femininity of 

 the queen, and perchance some day a more 

 intense feminine pronoun would come. As 

 an example of this sort of thing, Russian chil- 

 dren, being obliged to call the priest "papa," 

 now call their real papas " papinka." 



I believe I didn't say that the use of femi- 

 nine forms was unknown in literature, nor 

 even that it was rare ; so citations of that 

 character contradict nothing. What I said 

 was that masculine forms, not in strict accu- 

 racy, were fully supported by usage, and that 

 assertion is hardly shaken yet, I think. 



As to Bible usage, that is not an important 

 corner of this controversy; but as Gleanings 

 has very many Bible-lovers among its readers 

 I should like to talk Bible a little on its own 

 account. I believe that more than half of 

 real Bible-lovers have never got on to the fact 

 that the Bible always substitutes the masculine 

 for the neuter in the possessive case of the 

 pronoun. Not a single "its" in all the Bible, 

 when there would naturally be such multitudes 

 of them — always " his." Failure to consider 

 this upsets the meaning of many passages. 

 Readers,* when they come to such a ' his," do 

 not dream of its referring to the neuter ante- 

 cedent right at hand, but think it must refer 

 to the Lord, or to some person not plainly in 

 view. Age, as- well as sex, is rather violently 

 ignored in the Bible sometimes. "Ye on the 

 sabbath day circumcise a man " (that is, a 

 babe eight days old). "Christ tasted death 

 for every tna?i . ' ' Here it is certain that woman 



