A new customer tonight posed a question I'd not thought of before. Do pianos have gender? Ships are female. Female gender identity is also sometimes ascribed to other things - cars, etc. This lady was inclined to view her c1900 straight-strung (though underdamped) upright as female. I'd never considered this before. But I did say to her that I've long maintained that 1) a piano 2) an open coal fire and 3) a grandfather clock, are all quasi-living things in a home. And if they have quasi-life, ought they not to have quasi-gender? I suppose the grandfather clock would have to be male. I wondered afterwards, had the piano been a new one, would she have ascribed gender to it, and if so, which? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20090115/5fc0f931/attachment.html>
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