Many-Selved Etymological Glossary, OCRing Many Voices/S4OS, and Orion Scribner

[lb_lee]

There are a bunch of plural glossaries out there, but they tend to be lacking in context as to who created a term, where it came from, and how it spread. So, a few days ago, we decided to amass all the many-selved terms we could recall if not who coined it, at least a decent idea as to WHERE and WHEN it came from, with the idea of making an etymological glossary, both textual and visual (in the style of this chart of musical genres/musicians of the 1950s-1970s from Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations).

Right now we're at around 50 terms, ranging from highly unpopular medical terms of the 1800s ("duplex personality" never caught on) up to quoigenic at 2016. We are choosing to halt our charting at around then, because the genic slapfight EXPLODED with a gazillion terms that we never used and have zero interest in documenting, plus we have no idea which terms get fucking USED with any frequency besides traumagenic, endogenic, and quoigenic. (Besides, Pluralpedia probably has that time period covered better.)

Since our earliest medical term in English we have onhand is from 1816 ("double consciousness," used by Mitchell, and I'm pretty sure he yoinked it from the French) that gives us 200 years of many-selved terminological slapfighting in English. (There are a number of German and French sources from the 1800s that probably influenced the English terminology, but I'm choosing to stick with the language I know.)

Because of the nature of the sources I have, and my own upbringing, medical terms are disproportionately represented, and eventually I'll have to make a judgment call as to what terms doctors call us vs. terms we call ourselves, but that's a problem for future me. And I still think it might be valuable to chart which medical terms stuck around (multiple personality vs manifold personality), and also just to see the docs duking it out in the 1800s, especially since my multi community records don't start until 1986.

So far, the main research pools I've been drawing from are:

• Goettman, Greaves & Coons. Multiple Personality and Dissociation, 1791-1992: A Complete Bibliography (Man, SO glad we found that book, fed it through the bookscanner, and that Orion Scribner OCRed it for us!)
• fuckin' Astraea's private BBS .txt files from 1992-1995
• alt.support.dissocation (1994-2024, RIP)
• the Sidran Foundation's glossary from 1998 (linked a bunch in alt.support.dissociation, also surprisingly good at saying where it got its terms from--I might've helped chase where "blending" came from, thanks to it!)
• Eclective's soulbonding glossary from 2001?
• Anachronic Army's glossary from 2001
• The Pavilion Hall glossary (which yoinked Anachronic Army's in 2002)
• fuckin' Astraea's earliest glossary (which yoinked Pavilion Hall's in 2003)
• Eclective's soulbonding glossary from 2004

But I quickly realized there was a big, glaring hole in my research: the Many Voices newsletter archives, which ranges from 1989-2012 (and also I guess that one orphaned 1986 issue of Speaking For Our Selves). 142 newsletters, none searchable or screenreadable. The thought of manually reading through, one by one, made me shudder.

But then I went, "Hey... isn't Orion Scribner unemployed right now?" So I hired them and they went and OCRed the whole kit and kaboodle! What a public service! What a mensch!

Right now, I am completely exhausted and working on my taxes, but when that's out of the way, I plan to upload all of these files to archive.org so everyone can use them. Three cheers for Orion Scribner!

Comments

[gze]

Three cheers! Thank y'all for all your hard work, we're stoked to see the glossary and these files on archive.org! Etymology and how terms cross languages is so fascinating, we had no idea that those earlier English terms got their influence from French and German.

-The Silvermoon Team

[lb_lee]

Neither did I, until I got my hands on Goettman, Greaves, and Coons! That’s a whole swathe of medical multi history I know nothing about.

[anomalymonster]

We're very excited for this and appreciate the effort behind this project! There's been ton of terms we've run into in glossaries and tried to research more into, but found nothing. Recently we also tried to track down where and when "fronting" started to be used, but turned up nothing beyond and iffy citation from Pavilion which we tried and couldn't verify. Having the Many Voices newsletter be OCRed would be incredible in general too and make it a lot more accessible!

[lb_lee]

I don’t know exactly who coined fronting, but I know it was being used enough that people didn’t see the need to define it by 1990! It’s one of my goofiest citations: Michael A. Rosen’s “Sexual Portraits”, and it’s being used to discuss kink personas: https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/1373992.html

I SUSPECT it came from the Troops for Truddi Chase’s “the Front Runner” from When Rabbit Howls in 1987, but haven’t proven it and still need to go through S4OS and early Many Voices. It’s clear Bill and Sybil from Sexual Portraits didn’t coin the term! And I’ve been wrong before—for example, “system” seems to come from IFS, but “parts has been proven to predate it!

EDIT: Okay, I dug into S4OS and MV, and though I saw no reference in S4OS (though it's just one issue, and at times the scan quality is bad, so I should go through manually just to make sure), it was being used in Many Voices by the time of April 1989: at the bottom of page 6, someone going by SD says, "We are taking turns, sharing some experiences, and having patience with whoever is 'up front' at the time. We are a family now, so no one is alone."

It wasn't COMMONLY used, though; the next use of it isn't until June 1990, page 8, from Lynn D.: "We don't 'switch' radically in public, though someone may come to the front to say something once in a while." Those are the only uses I can find that could be before Sexual Portraits, and it's always "front" as a noun, not a verb, which is how Sybil and Bill use it: "She hardly ever appears in public, preferring to let Holiday, Sybil Holiday, and Mistress Sybil front for her."

Unfortunately, it turns out my ebook of When Rabbit Howls is corrupted, and the replacement I got keeps crashing my machine. So that's just going to have to wait for checking til another time. (God, what a pain.)

EDIT AGAIN: Okay, I finally got When Rabbit Howls up and running (that took way longer and was more obnoxious than expected) and yes, the front terms seem to come from them. This would explain why the term isn't used in S4OS; my issue predates When Rabbit Howls.

Besides the Front Runner herself, "Front Runner" seems to be a term for anyone we now call a fronter. (Chapter Seven: "Any Troop member who wanted to be a part-time Front Runner first had to travel with the Outrider...") There's also this line from chapter 5: "Nails, a Troop member who dealt with rejection, charged up front. Nails was now 'sitting forward' in the mind of the woman who could still hear and operate, and therefore believed that the actions and words were her own." The term "up front" is used multiple times, and in Chapter Eighteen, there's "Certain informed Troop minds surged to the forefront, intent on a single act—to protect that which was now in grave danger." The Troops also refer to "the front lines" in Chapter Twenty, which gives context for their terminology: armies have fronts they battle on.

How the term "broke containment" and made it to the kinksters by 1990, I don't know, but I'd LOVE to find out!

[anomalymonster]

That you so much for looking, that's really interesting! For awhile we were under the impression it was a psychiatric term, we had no idea it came from the Troops! That's especially interesting that it came from front line, and makes a lot of sense.

What sparked this for me was when we were looking at the Pavilion site hosted on Karitas, while it looks like front was correctly cited, I noticed "Fronting" was credited to Shaytar. We couldn't find anything on their website when we looked, but I also know they have other online presences and I'm not familiar with that outside of their essays.

Out of curiosity too I decided to check alt.support.dissociation where it's archived in Google groups and it looks like it was first used very sporadically around 1996-1998, and I'm not sure if that tracks with Shaytar being credited as the coiner for fronting specifically.

[lb_lee]

That's strange; I know Shaytar coined "empowered multiple" but unless they were around before 1990, they couldn't have coined front as a stand-alone verb. So far, Sexual Portraits still has seniority. (And it's HARD finding multi community records before 1990!) I dunno that I would trust Pavilion Hall's citation on that front, no pun intended, especially since that's not what the old Pavilion glossary from 2002 says.

[lithophiles]

They most definitely were not around (in the online multiple community, that is; they're bodily close to our age) before 1990. Don't trust the Pavilion citation. It's just straight-up misinformation and I don't know where it came from.

-Amaranthus

[lb_lee]

Heh, just as well we'd already dismissed it then. (Helped that we already had such an off-the-wall early citation that would be hard to beat or connect to Shaytar later!)

[lithophiles]

Good grief, I haven't the faintest idea where crediting "fronting" to Shaytar came from. We remember being under the impression that it came from "When Rabbit Howls" too, and... well, I'm embarrassed to say we were involved in Pavilion, at least to the extent that we were allowed to be (the people unofficially officially in charge seemed to deeply resent us for reasons we were never fully clear about, though it was one of those "You KNOW what you did." "...no, I still don't know what I did"-type situations, and so we were prevented from editing and rewriting the webpages as much as possible.) We were still very, VERY new to being multiple at that point, though; we'd only been selves-aware for about a year when the Pavilion pages were being written and were in (very misplaced) awe of Astraea at that point. So we bit back a lot of our questions and criticisms, especially once it became clear that anything other than unwavering support would be met with hostility.

...which is to say, I guess, it's been a long time, but we still intensely regret having had a role in the misinformation spread by Pavilion and the misinformed view it promoted of itself. (It was very good at making people think it was this important, elite organization that almost no one met the criteria to join, but very bad at doing actual activism.)

-Julian & Amaranthus

[lb_lee]

Rogan: Yeah, I feel very safe pegging the term to the Troops for Truddi Chase, since the military-ish style makes sense for them, combined with being able to pretty reliably chart the rise and spread of the term. It's kinda the perfect place and time, since it gets created RIGHT as my multi community records do.

[frameacloud]

^_^

[lb_lee]

Thaaaaank youuuuuuuu