[Hellsgate] Job titles (was: Yule Brewing)

[Chris Zakes]

At 12:57 PM 9/24/2012, you wrote:

>Autocrat/Steward same thing
>Keyna


Well... yes and no. In the SCA, the terms are pretty much 
interchangable, but "steward" is a little more historically accurate.

Story time, childrren!
While setting up the SCA's second event, Marion Zimmer Bradley (yes, 
the science fiction author) was filling out a form to reserve a park 
in San Francisco and one of the questions on the form was "Title." 
The first thing that popped into her head was "autocrat" so that's 
what she put down, and the name stuck. (One of the earlier questions 
on that form was "name of organization", and that's where "Society 
for Creative Anachronism" comes from.)

Since then, tacking -ocrat onto any SCA-related job has become pretty common.

Twenty or twenty-five years ago (at least in Ansteorra) people 
started pushing for more historically accurate names: event steward 
instead of autocrat, head cook or feast steward instead of 
feastocrat, gate instead of troll, privy instead of Shrine of St. 
John of the Swirling Waters, etc.

Nowadays some folks use the historically accurate names, some folks 
use the "traditional" names. It's pretty much a matter of personal 
preference. If you look through the event announcements in the 
Kingdom Calendar http://calendar.ansteorra.org/ or Black Star, you'll 
see that both terms are used.

         -Tivar Moondragon