"Masseuse" replacing "masseur"?

[Chris Waigl]

Laurence Horn wrote:

>Me too.  But check out "male masseuse" on google:  537 hits.
>
Only *271 if you click on the last available page of search results
(setting Google to 100 results/page). Of which there are a certain
number of "she male masseuse" and at least half refer to sexual services
or are spam pages.
*

>Pales
>in comparison to the 2,130,000 hits for "masseur" (including of
>course both male-specific and underspecified/sex-unmarked
>applications), not to mention the 1,740,000 hits for "masseuse" tout
>court, but still not negligible, and I'm pretty sure "male masseuse"
>will (as it were) come up not infrequently in the domain of
>umliterature.
>
>
Google searches with nearly-all relevant results:

{"he is | was | became  a masseuse"}  79
{"he is | was | became  a masseur"}  375
{"he is | was a * masseuse"}         135
{"he is | was a * masseur"}          116

I'm not sure what to make of this, and other searches have conflicting
and contradictory results -- Google counts are all over the place these
days.

(This also ensures that results in other languages -- French, German,
certainly others -- are excluded. In German, "Masseuse" is nearly
exclusively used in the "female provider of sexual services" sense, at
least since the professional organizations have shifted to "Masseurin"
(= "Masseur" + feminine suffix /-in/ for the names of
jobs/professions/occupations), to mark the difference.)

Chris Waigl