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Color gender convention

Posted By: Nack Ballard
Date: Wednesday, 11 May 2011, at 3:58 p.m.

In Response To: Blue = male, White = female (mtuhtan)

From Backgammon Openings, page xviii:

Color Gender.. We use masculine pronouns to refer to Black and feminine pronouns to refer to White. For example, if Black makes "his" 5pt, "he" becomes the favorite. If White escapes "her" back checkers, "she" improves "her" position.

Paul and I gave a name to the color gender convention but we didn't invent it; it's been used before. The benefit is in keeping the text crisp, less cumbersome; so that "Black" (or dark) and "White" (or light) can be repeated less often while still clearly conveying points of analysis.

Examples of the convention's application I've seen are with dark-colored checkers on the near side and light-colored checkers on the far side. I haven't yet had to decide what to do on light near side, dark far side (the reverse of the standard/traditional placement) as I'm waiting for XG2 to be fully released before posting XG diagrams. :)

In chess diagrams, White is on the near side and Black is on the far side (perhaps explaining Xavier's innovative though somewhat unpopular experiment in applying the same paradigm to backgammon), but I don't remember seeing the color gender convention applied to chess. Maybe it was avoided because some pieces themselves are suggestive of gender (king = male, queen = female).

Nack

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