[ANSTHRLD] Youth Boffer class name updates

[tmcd@panix.com]

On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Hillary Greenslade <hillaryrg at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I have yet another challenge of research for the Heralds.  In a
> recent scribally related conversation with Lady Donnel Shaw who
> heads up the youth boffer program, she requested that I assist her
> in finding new, more period name potentials for the four youth
> boffer ranks/classes.

I don't know of any period examples of titles that tended to vary by
age except page versus squire, and I have the impression that pages
could be older and squires of the body could be adults of any age.
So I wonder whether it may be a case of trying to find period words
for intrinsically non-period concepts.  I think that such words
usually jar me more than the non-period word -- "telephone" is
intrinsically modern, but I find "farspeaker" to be more modern
because of the extra topping of "that's not a word".

> We considered:
> Freshmen, Sophmore, Junior, Senior
> Skunk, Opossum, Armadillo, Wolf (definately a joke!)
> Meridies uses: Bear, Ram, Wolf

Any period examples of things like those applied to people or to
levels, or of the examples I snipped (constallations, planets, and
such)?  The OED 1st edition has "sophomore" only from 1688.  Further,
the animal levels make me think of Boy Scouts, which date from the
1800s.

Certainly the Middle Ages and Renaissance had a really really strict
notion of hierarchy -- the Great Chain of Being and such, with every
object in the universe in its assigned slot.  And they loved analogy
and correspondences: the lion is the noblest of beasts, the eagle of
birds, the oak of trees; black is for Saturn, red is for Mars, ....
So I can see them saying that the stages of youth are like the stages
of something else.  But I don't know that they actually came up with
names for finer stages of youth.

> 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th
> Children, Youth, Junior, Senior

At least those are non-descript.  You might go with the ordinals in
Latin, with the most developed as first (because the top of the
hierarchy was "prince" (as in Machiavelli), not "17th"): Quartus,
Tertius, Secundus, Primus.

Unless someone comes up with some period-like names, I'd advise
sticking with the existing names for lack of anything better:

> Children's Boffer Division (Ages 6-9)
> Youth Boffer Division (Ages 10-12)
> Teen Boffer Division (Ages 13-15)
> Youth Chivalric Division (Ages 16-17)

Daniel Lindonium
-- 
Tim McDaniel; Reply-To: tmcd at panix.com