Scientress*

“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.

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.

She was an average fighter, but she was a BRILLIANT scientist

https://mybookjoy.com/2023/06/14/word-origins-is-scientist-a-womanly-word/

This person did a good write up of this claim

Behind many famous scientists there was a great woman whose work earned them the Nobel Prize.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scientist#h1

“Man of science” sounds so much cooler than “scientist”. Such a shame it’s not used anymore

This is cool and all but I feel like “Woman of Science” was the obvious workaround to their problem.

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.”

This has to be bait or something. The fake fact aside, who would be against gendered professions and simultaneously advocating to gender a profession?

It’s Man of Science, not male scientist. It’s right there in the post.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/unheralded-women-scientists-finally-getting-their-due-180973082/

She has become the thing she hates.

I guess it could have been, “sciencist”. Glad it’s not.