Movies Star Trek Beyond (English)
Elida Obrian
@ Simon and @Pavel. There's perhaps a loose connection with ragazzo/ragazza in Italian. It's narrow meaning is boy/girl through to late teenagerhood. Can also mean boyfriend/girlfriend. But can certainly be used disparagingly as a term of dismissal or condemnation. But can also be used among/between older men and women as a term of affection (not unusual to witness Italian aged pensioners greeting each other as ragazzi/ragazze, and like lads and lassies is very much contextually driven, from the Labour MPs clear sexism; to the affection of people who are well known to each other, and respect each other.
There is also a curious construction in Italian of ragazzo padre/ragazza madre, which is loosely translated as "single father/mother/parent", with a slight, to me, connotation of not being married. Absolutely no idea where this might fit into the lads and lassies part of the linguistic cosmos!
I rather think this usage might have been in keeping with the speech of the original 'Scotty', and not so much with anyone actually Scottish. His style of Scottish-English was always fairly ersatz. It sounded like they would stick in any dialect words the writers could think of, without worrying too much about nuance.
When I watched "Star Trek Beyond" I was mostly paying attention to the xenolinguistics (which I wrote about here), but I don't recall Scotty using lassie when addressing Lt. Uhura. I do remember him using it in his scenes with the character Jaylah (Sofia Boutella), a headstrong young female alien. As Jaylah is outside of the Enterprise chain of command, vocative lassie might be a bit less problematic than it would be for Uhura.
Ben is quite right: I saw "Star Trek Beyond" on Saturday night, right here in Scotland with an audience of lads and lassies (I'll be submitting the receipt for the tickets to the Language Log accounts department today for reimbursement), and I don't recall any scene in which Scotty talks to Uhura at all. The part where he's saying "lassie" all the time are the comic-relief scenes of his first encounter with Jaylah, the alien scavenger with the zebra-striped face that the Enterprise crew encounter living in the wreck of an abandoned star ship. Scotty's casual colloquialism (addressed to a young person who is not employed by the Federation) didn't strike me as sexist at all. Are people really so exercised about political correctnesses these days that they stand around in pubs worrying about sexism in a humorous scene involving 23rd-century fictional characters one of whom isn't even human?
In support of RachelP's theory, the late Anton Yelchin, who spoke Russian, reprised some of the cod-Russianisms originated by Walter Koenig. Earlier, the remastered "Star Wars" retained and even enhanced some of the well-known bloopers from the original release.
Which raises an interesting question. Is the script in Star Trek a literal rendition of the Federation-Speak of the time, or a "translation" into our version of English. The easy out for the scriptwriters would be to say that "lassie" has become by the time of the federation a totally neutral way to address a female of any kind.
@KeithB,
This has always been an issue of artistic license in Star Trek (as well as other shows set in the future or with aliens). You have random fully translatable Klingon words or phrases uttered by Klingons who are otherwise speaking English. I don't recall any future slang in Star Trek beyond the made-up tech and stuff that goes with it. The closest you get to that is the "stardate" date/time system, which has been replaced by more or less the current dating system in the reboot films.
Obviously "lassie" is gender-specific, but would the same MP who condescended to Ms. Sturgeon (20 years younger than him, per wikipedia) have plausibly referred to a male political rival of the same age and substantive views as Ms. Sturgeon as a "wee laddie wi a tin helmet on"? Would that have had similar rhetorical force to a Scots-speaking audience?
Scotty: Well, I'm sure that's what the lieutenant wants. She just didn't understand. [To Lt. Romaine] Did you now, lass?
Chapel: [imitating Scotty's brogue] Well, with a bedside manner like that, Scotty, you're in the wrong business.
Kirk: Scotty, where have you been? Where are you?
Scotty: In the sick bay.
Kirk: Are you sick?
Scotty: Oh no. I was just checking on the lass. She's going to be fine and there's nothing wrong with her.
Just to follow up on KChang's comment, I did recall Douhan using lad, lass, laddie and lassie in multiple episodes and later in the Star Trek movies. In some cases, it was used as a mannerism, but, in others, the usage was clearly dismissive, although not overtly sexist. There are several databases that contain entire scripts (as subtitles) so it should be possible to track them down for comparison. Given the nature of the film, i suspect, this was meant as a bit of a micro-tribute to Douhan.
A biography of a classic also promises to offer insights, be they specific or general, into the mind of its writer at the time the work was conceived and during its gestation. Given that Wells wrote dozens of books that were far from masterpieces, what were the special circumstances that contributed to his production of this superior work? Moreover, as a classic is almost by definition older than ourselves, we are likely to be curious about how it was received on publication. Was it instantly hailed? Or was it so far ahead of its time that its status was not recognized until our own surely more sophisticated age? How acute or dull-witted were our forebears when the newly hatched masterpiece first tottered into view?
As is sadly the case even with some of the most distinguished presses these days, the study has not always been meticulously copyedited. For example, there are occasional unnecessary repetitions (e.g., the I.F. Clarke quotation on pages 13 and 44; the reference to Annie Meredith on pages 41 and 55) and odd usages, such as factional for factual or based on historical fact (42, 44, 47, etc.) These small flaws aside, Professor Beck should be highly commended for this major, readable, and always interesting addition to Wellsian scholarship.
The essays in this special issue of Extrapolation each make use of the idea of Indigenous Futurism and the concept of survivance in their theoretical approach to discussing Indigenous sf. Each author in the issue utilizes similar but different threads of Indigenous Futurism and/or survivance, bringing a variety of related elements to the forefront depending on their particular analytical framework. This special issue emerges at a critical moment in which more and more works of Indigenous sf are being produced, and it offers a host of creative and diverse methods to interpret these works as examples of Indigenous Futurism.
Secondly, Ruddick notes the tendency for films to insert a romantic subplot. Showing where they are typically extraneous to the thematic concerns of the source text, he attributes this to the need for films to appeal to female viewers because most classic sf is so male-centered. While this is true, it also ignores the similar understanding of mainstream (Hollywood) cinema as an ideological institution for endorsing dominant ideology, including patriarchy and monogamous heterosexuality. Much work has been done discussing the common Oedipal arc of Hollywood movies in which, say, defeating the monster allows the hero to win the hand (and the rest of the body) of the woman in the narrative, successfully assuming his place within heterosexual masculine culture.
The Child to Come breaks new ground by posing a political impasse and calling for alternative and, crucially, queer futures. In order for sf studies to take up this call, it must think the limit of reproductive futurism and beyond it to new horizons that are so much more than capitalist, so much more than human.
As Wythoff notes, The Perversity of Things is designed to provide readers with a fresh perspective on the origins of sf as one of the most important modes of storytelling in technoscientific modernity. Like other genre historians, Wythoff locates those origins in the writings of Hugo Gernsback, who published the first dedicated sf magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926. Wythoff, however, does not treat the launch of Amazing as the starting point for modern sf. Instead, he proposes that
Wythoff proves this claim admirably in the 50-plus information- and illustration-rich introductory pages that follow, restoring Gernsback to his rightful place in media history while illustrating how that history influenced the development of sf as a literary genre.
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