OOC: Draconomicon

[sythyry]

A bit of OOC stuff about the dragon novel. Only in sythyry 'cause it's a poll.

In this irromantic story about dragons, I want to have words for male and female dragons that sound a bit less clinical than "male" and "female". "Dragoness" is fine for female.

I've been using "drake" for "male dragon".

Which is sort of sensible, 'cause that word (a) is sometimes used for a dragon, and (b) is sometimes used for a male (of another species).

[Poll #1060106]

Comments

[redbird]

I expect that it would eventually come clear, but it would take me a while.

Thought: you could, by analogy to ducks/drakes, simply use "dragon" for the females, and make "drake" the marked state for when you needed to specify that you were referring to males. So "there are five dragons in the yard" might well be a mixed-sex group, but "the resident was a young dragon" would mean either female, or that the viewpoint character had assumed zie was observing a female.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Yeah... but I seem to want to refer to a marked group of females at least as often as a marked group of males. And since males outnumber females 2:1, I don't think it makes sense to have female be the linguistic default. Thanks, though.