ACTRESS vs. WAITRESS

[Mark Mandel]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 10:31 AM
Subject: Re: ACTRESS vs. WAITRESS
To: ronbutters at aol.com


True enough. But to be certain, we'd have to look at (a good sample of) the
actual hits to see who is saying what about themselves, and when. It is
conceivable -- even likely --  that third-person female ("She is an __") is
more heavily weighted toward the conservative "actress" than first-person
female ("I am an __"). And, as you noted, only examination of the hits will
tell the proportion of female to male among those who say "I am an actor".

Mark Mandel


On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 10:18 AM, <ronbutters at aol.com> wrote:

> Good points, and one could tell a lot from looking at a significant random
> sample to see what the days spread is. I do think that it is fair to
> conclude that the internet is heavily weighted to recent data. And, even
> just looking at the raw data that I reported, it would have to be the
> unlikely case that the data came largely from earlier entries to support the
> conclusion that most female actors call themselves "actresses."
> Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
>
> Date:         Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:07:47
> To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: [ADS-L] ACTRESS vs. WAITRESS
>
>
> If we are looking at a recent change, raw ghits may be unreliable because
> we
> don't know when they were uttered. 20k hits of Mae West, Katharine Hepburn,
> and their contemporaries saying "I am an actress" (to pull numbers out of
> the air) would seriously skew the counts. While all the counts would be
> blindly spread across a span of many decades, such "time dil*u*tion" would
> obscure any changes. We would expect "dictionaries & style manuals" to be
> weighted toward older usage, if only because data collection, analysis, and
> publishing haven't caught up.
>
> Mark Mandel
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 10:35 PM, <RonButters at aol.com> wrote:
>
> ...
> >
> > "I am an actress"--52,400 hits
> > "She is an actress"--93,000 hits
> > "I am an actor"--93,000 hits
> > "She is an actor"--10,800 hits.
> ...

> In a message dated 1/25/09 9:34:43 PM, ann at burlinghambooks.com writes:
> >
> >
> > > On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 4:05 PM,=A0 <ronbutters at aol.com> wrote:
> > -----
> > > >
> > > > But there is a difference between what one might prefer and actual
> usage=
> > > If dictionaries & style manuals are accurate, ACTRESS is still
> widely=20
> > > accepted, whereas WAITRESS is increasingly avoided as "sexist."
> > >=20
> > > When I listen to what women actors call themselves, it's "actor", so
> > > that is what I call them.
>

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