Howling:Revisiting the why of the cracks: Difference between revisions
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:Personally, I think Time Lord would be more correct. It's not a title, it's a species. We don't (usually) have separate gender-based names for other species. We just use the general term "male" and "female" to describe the individual gender of an single entity '''within''' a species. Plus, this use of the word Lord isn't a term of respect, it literally has to do with them being lords (or gods) of time. I only even asked because I know that the gender-change ability is a somewhat recent inclusion into the show, and couldn't remember if it had been explained in the classic series. [[User:Saghan|Saghan]] [[User talk:Saghan|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 18:55, October 1, 2012 (UTC) | :Personally, I think Time Lord would be more correct. It's not a title, it's a species. We don't (usually) have separate gender-based names for other species. We just use the general term "male" and "female" to describe the individual gender of an single entity '''within''' a species. Plus, this use of the word Lord isn't a term of respect, it literally has to do with them being lords (or gods) of time. I only even asked because I know that the gender-change ability is a somewhat recent inclusion into the show, and couldn't remember if it had been explained in the classic series. [[User:Saghan|Saghan]] [[User talk:Saghan|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 18:55, October 1, 2012 (UTC) | ||
::In the classic series, in reference to females, we heard each term twice, and that's it, in 26 seasons. (There are mentions of terms like "Lady President", but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.) Romana didn't blink an eye at being called a Time Lady by either the Doctor or Adric. In the novelisations, "Time Lady" appears all over the place in description and narrative tags (it sometimes seems like Terrance Dicks thought Romana's name was "The Time Lady"), but neither one comes up much in conversation. In the Virgin and BBC novels, both of them come up quite a few times, but it seems to vary more by author than by situation. | |||
::I think the only reasonable answer is that both are perfectly correct. In the majority of human languages, the male form is also used as the gender-nonspecific form. English is only partly that way today, so it sounds strange for a woman to say something like "I am a man, not an animal", but in plenty of languages it would be just as reasonable as "I am a woman, not a girl" from the same person. | |||
::As for whether Time Lord is a species or a title, there's so much conflicting information that we really can't say. In fact, sometimes it's clearly _neither_ of the two, but yet another thing. Look at the Doctor's speech about Jenny in The Doctor's Daughter—he's describing "Time Lord" as some kind of ethnic/cultural term like "Jew". Again, the novels give us a lot more information, but only make things even more confusing. Behind the scenes, Graham Williams said that in The Invasion of Time he deliberately avoided the term as much as possible because he had absolutely know idea whether all Gallifreyans were Time Lords, just the nobles, or some other subset, or what. If the producer of the show found it hopelessly confused after just a handful of Time Lord episodes, what hope do we have? --[[Special:Contributions/70.36.140.233|70.36.140.233]]<sup>[[User talk:70.36.140.233#top|talk to me]]</sup> 03:55, October 2, 2012 (UTC) | |||
