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

[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.