It's a mildly interesting topic, but the 'myth' (if it is one) is hardly killed by the accumulated trivia in the article (some of which seems to favor neither side), and the tone is somewhat off-putting - dragging-in sexism and personal quarrels totally unnecessarily:
> Whilst working at or visiting castles I inevitably hear a dad proudly imparting this knowledge to his little boy (and it usually is boys’ talk) and it may be that this familial link creates a strong bond between the myth and its proponents.
>[EDIT: Within a matter of hours of publishing this post one kind gent on a discussion forum had already publicly declared it as “drivel” – it’s odd what folk will get wound up about on the internet.]
Take a sample of O(10) year olds, pick out the ones interested in knights killing each other in a castle, you will find the selection heavily biased towards boys. Probably similar with parents instead of kids.
It’s hardly sexism, it’s a pervasive fact of societal interest distribution.
> It’s hardly sexism, it’s a pervasive fact of societal interest distribution.
I'm not denying the possible 'societal interest distribution', I simply felt it was an irrelevant strawman that's virtually impossible to argue against without instantly being called-out as a sexist "gent", and had no place in what purported to be a historical discussion about stairways.
Well, it's a personal blog about a subject. It is information, sources and prose, really anything the author finds interesting and persistent to the subject.
If a particular myth has a particular following in any identifiable subset of the society, that's interesting to me. In particular, just before the passage you question, the author states
> One reason for [resilience of this myth] might be the frequency of its repetition by parents to children.
so a casual observation about it being more of a father-and-son thing is permissibly relevant in the context of a blog. And it sounds like this guy spends a fair amount of time around castles. You might disagree with it, you might argue it is due to biases involved in raising children, or other things too, but sexism it is most certainly not.
Imo, most likely it is sexist remark about dads. If it is not, it is observation that the people visiting castles act in sexist ways.
> Whilst working at or visiting castles I inevitably hear a dad proudly imparting this knowledge to his little boy (and it usually is boys’ talk)
Like common, the "proudly imparting" is there to achieve emotional response on the reader and make dad sounds like funny figure. If you want to keep it factual and objective, most parents (both dads and moms) don't disseminate this sort of trivia "proudly". There is whole range of emotions involved from bored to interested. Sometimes they use funny voice to get kid interested.
And as someone who likes to visit castles, you don't actually overhear it so super often. Nor do you hear it targeted at children as much. Moreover, "little boys", even when interested in fight and swords, they don't really care about technical details of either. They certainly don't care about left turning vs right turning staircase. This is beyond what little kids care about.
This sort of thing tend to be explained to much younger kids then 10. And I assure you, little girl visiting the castle will listen to exact same trivia with total interest too. I mean, common, castles feature both genders of kids, they all go through all rooms.
> pick out the ones interested in knights killing each other in a castle, you will find the selection heavily biased towards boys
Like really, kids of both genders when being in castle and looking at knight armor are going to listen to you talking about knights fighting. They will be way more biased when picking souvenir toys, there they will follow gender. But the whispered "this turns right because this or that" does not have that large bias of interest.
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If the author is wrong about this trivia being explained only to buys, then the author is making sexist assumption about dads. Which is possible actually.
The article explicitly states that it is not going to present the evidence against the myth; it isn't trying to demonstrate that the myth is false, it's leaving that for elsewhere.
That's not really a point in the article's favour. Instead it makes it kind of frustrating and pointless. Anyone can write unsupported assertions about anything. Maybe they're right, maybe they're not.
It's not pointless, it's just on a different topic. It's about who first suggested the idea. It's only "frustrating and pointless" if you thought the article was about the the truth or falsity of the idea, rather than who first suggested it; and the opening makes it pretty clear which of the two it's about.
The point is that he did research and didn't find any evidence to support the claim that the staircases were designed this way for defense. We can't know (without reading his book) whether this research was thorough, but the onus really is on the person making the initial claim - that the staircases were designed for defense - to support it. His claim is simply that there's no evidence to support that initial claim.
No, because it discusses who first suggested the idea. I'd say that's interesting whether the claim is true or false. It's not pointless just because it's not on the topic you thought it was on.
> Whilst working at or visiting castles I inevitably hear a dad proudly imparting this knowledge to his little boy (and it usually is boys’ talk) and it may be that this familial link creates a strong bond between the myth and its proponents.
>[EDIT: Within a matter of hours of publishing this post one kind gent on a discussion forum had already publicly declared it as “drivel” – it’s odd what folk will get wound up about on the internet.]