"Masseuse" replacing "masseur"?

[Laurence Horn]

>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.)
>
Great work, Chris.  This is very interesting, especially the German
distinction.


Larry