Aside from Comments on Cecil’s Columns/Staff Reports, General Questions is the forum that is most directly related to or patterned after Cecil’s own Straight Dope columns.
And as I pointed out in the MPSIMS thread you opened complaining about how this one went, Cecil himself has been known to indulge in the snark at times, and perhaps the forum takes its tone from Cecil’s own example at least a little bit.
In the Northern hemisphere - a waxing moon looks like a D, with the blacked-out side on the left. A waning moon has the blacked-out side to the right. To remember it, think of Loudon Wainwright - it wanes on the right.
And I was taught as a child that when the moon looks like a comma it’s coming.
Technically, wouldn’t a fruit be considered female? It’s a flower that’s been pollinated and now is bearing seed.
Well, in Spanish they can be frutas (f) or frutos (m)… La pera es una fruta, es el fruto del peral (A pear is a fruit, it’s the fruit a peartree gives)
Fruto is sort of more technical and it may include non-edible fruits, but other than that they’re synonymous.
I had reason to look into this myself recently, because I took for granted that the Sun more or less universally was considered masculine and then I thought, is it really so?
In his book Hermes, Harris says that that the Sun is masculine and the Moon is feminine is universal, but it was written a very long time ago and now we know that that isn’t true. Even a glance at this subject shows that gender associated with the Sun and Moon differs among cultures. According to Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, “Though the Moon is often feminine and the Moon deity a goddess, often the Moon god is male and the Moon is a man…”
But generally speaking, the Father god or creator is often a sky god and associated with the Sun, which makes the Sun masculine; the Moon is often associated with fertility and menstruation and so associated with femininity (see for instance Patterns in Comparative Religion, by Eliade). This is quite clear in Greek mythology for instance (Selene, Artemis and Hekate are all “Moon goddesses”; Zeus a sky god and Apollo a Sun god as well as Helios and so forth). In Roman mythology there is Sol and Luna, male and female, respectively. In Egyptian mythology, however, the male gods Thot and Khensu were a Moon gods, but other male gods, like Horus and Ra, were a Sun gods.
In England there is on the one hand “The Man in the Moon”, but on the other the Moon is referred to as “she”. The Germanic/Celtic Sunna (Sun) is a goddess, and in the Poetic Edda the Sun a “she” and the Moon a “he”, but to the best of my knowledge there were no particular gods associated with Sun and Moon, and no particular Sun or Moon cult either during the Viking Age. Also, according to* The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable* (Brewer) the Moon “is masculine in all the Teutonic languages”.
In alchemy the Sun always seems to be masculine and Moon feminine; see for instance Psychology and Alchemy (Jung) where there are, if nothing else, numerous alchemical images with Sun-King on the one hand, and Moon-Queen on the other; I have not seen the opposite, but I am not an expert on the matter.
Some North American cultures considered the Sun masculine (Navaho, Zuñi, for instance), others as feminine (Yuchi, Eskimo, for instance). Whether the Moon is male or female does not only differ among different cultures, but it is not even consistent within some cultures; for instance, the Jicarilla regards the Moon as “female (in connection with the with the menstrual cycle), but in ceremonial race Moon is represented as a male” (Standard Dictionary…). On the other hand it is much more common that personifications of the Sun is a male figure all over North America. In Australia there are personifications of the Sun which are female, on the other hand. In the larger cultures of Central and South America the Sun was, it seems, almost exclusively masculine. While in Japan Amaterasu of course is the Sun goddess and Tsukiyomi is the Moon god.
One could go on like this for a long time, but this is sufficient to show that Harris was wrong and that it simply differs among cultures whether Sun and Moon is masculine or feminine. I have mentioned a few books along the way, books I have in English in my library, since you asked for “citable information”; but if there is one source I would recommend regarding this subject it’d be Patterns in Comparative Religion, chapters “The Sun and Sun-Worship” and “The Moon and its Mystique” – especially the latter is a fascinating read.
Thanks to both.
It sounded more like you were expecting Bi answers.
Since “ship” has been mentioned as a “she,” bikers often refer to their bicycles as a “she.”
The sun is a “she.” You can tell because of its gigantic vagina.
OP,
In Hindu scriptures, both are are Gods of masculine gender.
In Sanskrit, all the planets are masculine. That includes both Sūrya (sun) and Candra (moon), and even Śukra (Venus).
In Arabic, shams (sun) is feminine, while qamar (moon) is masculine.
Tolkien put a footnote to a Hobbit song in The Lord of the Rings, “The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late,” in which the sun is called “She,” saying: “Elves (and Hobbits) refer to the Sun as She.”
In Watership Down, I believe both the sun (Frith, their god) and moon (Inlé) are male.