Chapter XI - Masculine + Feminine Pairs

Summary

Types of living beings are sometimes expressed by pairing the masculine term for that being with the feminine. For example, the totality of divine beings may be rendered by ‘(all) gods (and) goddesses’. Such pairings in Latin show variations between syndetic and asyndetic coordination, with the asyndetic variant common in legal language but coordination usually preferred otherwise. I have just used the term ‘totality’, but it is misleading without specification. ‘Men (and) women’ may refer to the infinite number of male and female adults in the world, but the phrase is more likely in ordinary narrative to denote a finite, even small, group in a particular context. The term ‘merism’ is all very well in idealised accounts of Indo-European poetics, but most people in the real world do not speak only in universals. Watkins’ definition (1995: 9, 15) of merism is ‘a two-part figure which makes reference to the totality of a single higher concept’. West (2007: 99–100), more clearly, refers to ‘pairings of contrasted terms, as an emphatic expression of the totality that they make up’. The method of coordination in male–female pairs in Latin seems unaffected by the difference between a finite set and an infinite.