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Alicorn comments on Of Gender and Rationality - Less Wrong
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Comments (342)
I'm the most intellectually curious person I know (in non-Less Wrong circles, anyway), but of course I could be an exception.
Considering that an alicorn is a unicorn's horn, I think mine is a fairly girly username. Unless there is a unicorn-loving male element I should be aware of.
Interesting... all the places I've seen the word, it meant a winged unicorn*. But reading this post drove me to look it up, and I did find both definitions. Less Wrong: raising new interest in definitions of mythological creature parts! :)
*Speaking of mythological definitions, I learned somewhere to distinguish between an alicorn, which has the goat-like body, lion's tail, beard, etc. of a unicorn, vs a horned pegasus, which has horse-like features. Not sure where that came from, but it's firmly implanted in my stores of useless knowledge.
So, unicorn pegasus actually is a meaning of alicorn? I always thought that was limited to the My Little Pony community.
Fantasy authors are not as a general rule inclined to adhere so rigidly to your taxonomy ;)
Apparently sufficiently girly that I didn't even know that's what it was...
The downvote suggests I need to elaborate. Alicorn thought she was fairly clearly signaling her gender by using a feminine username. I had seen her username in previous comments and did not know the word so it did not signal her gender effectively to me. Perhaps my vocabulary is just inadequate but if I'm at all representative then I think the misunderstanding is worth noting as one small way in which male and female posters may fail to communicate due to hidden assumptions.
Wacky theory: it sounds masculine because it ends in a consonant.
Sorry alicorn... I thought you were a guy too <blush> The nick isn't girly enough for this girl to pick up on. May be a cultural reference that's not common enough?
If high intellectual curiosity is a rare trait in males and a very rare one in females, then given that you are here this doesn't surprise me. You are more intellectually curious than most of the men I have met, which is itself a high intellectual curiosity sample.
I don't think you're the only one. I'm one of the most curious people I know (and I'm a girl)...
I would not describe myself as curious, but my brain automatically creates a few absurd theories per day, and I go nuts if I don't test them all. (which generally means I spend half an hour on wikipedia, and then repeat the process tomorrow with the new data)