[NEohioPAL] Female Actors, or Actettes

[James Kosmatka]

Dear Mr. Covey,

I fail to see how "actress" is inherently preferable to "female actor". The
use of gender-specific job titles seems to be rather haphazard in the
English language. For every "stewardess", "waitress", "actress",
"comedienne" and occasional "directress", there's a dozen neutral terms:
lawyer, surgeon, trucker, musician, writer, doctor, manager, teacher,
janitor, Jedi, president, senator, judge, jury and executioner. Really, if
you wanted to be consistent about the English language, you'd be championing
the use of janitress and jurette. Wikipedia tells me that it's from
nineteenth century grammarians Latinizing English, perhaps the Victorian
equivalent of heavy-handed linguistic prescriptivism. Taking your complaint
to its logical conclusion, perhaps we should reinstate the linguistic purity
that is Old English before the Norman Conquest. After all, Latin has been
vulgarizing English for some time. I cite the sixteenth century scholar Sir
John Cheeke: "Our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, vnmixt and
vnmangled with borrowing of other tunges."

About the best thing you can say for gender-specific job titles is that when
they refer to a person whose gender is intrinsic to their job duties (actor,
model, stripper, corrections officer), the use of the gender-specific noun
saves you a few syllables or keystrokes. I might also point out that of the
four examples above, only one of them has a common gender-specific
formation.

So maybe we should to start referring to them as strippers and strippresses.

Somewhat sincerely,
Jæmes Kosmatka

On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 4:11 PM, Stephen Covey <freedom.land at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
>
>
> Can anyone please explain to me the difference between "male actors" and
> "female actors".  What happened to the word "actress"?   Does one hear "The
> Best female actor in a supporting role is..."?   If I use the term "female
> actor",  can I also use the term "male actress".  Is it similar to "Server"
> vs. "Waiter/Waitress"?  I have been a Waiter at one point in life.  Being
> called "Waiter" did not offend me. Is this all about being "PC".  If so,
> this "PC" crap is getting out-of-hand!
>
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