abaya

Well, that would be the benefit of having a poll (posted by someone who's not biased towards one side or the other--maybe one of the mods?)... to see if there's a normal curve on this subject, as there are on most social science studies, or if some other kind of pattern is going on.

We need to get at least 30 women and 30 men to respond for it to mean anything, and also include age as a variable (e.g. divide up the response categories by gender and age, possibly marital status; income level would be a stretch to ask about here, but would make it even more valid as a poll). Perhaps we could scale it using 5 answer categories measuring degrees of comfort when hearing the term (extremely-very-somewhat-little-none), or 5 answers for whether people agree/disagree with the term being offensive (very much agree-somewhat agree-neither agree nor disagree-somewhat disagree-very much disagree), etc.

I'd be sincerely interested in seeing the results, just to know what the lurking audience is thinking... lurkers tend to respond to polls more than actually contribute to a thread, unfortunately. Of course, the main bias here is self-selection... only people whose interest is piqued by this topic are going to participate in the poll, which will skew the results. But it still might be interesting.

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And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran