blogress

[Victor Steinbok]

Would it have to be a godder, then to produce goddess?? Or is it
godress? Sorry, Joel--I just don't think it's as trivial as you're
suggesting... even in jest.

     VS-)

On 3/10/2012 11:09 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> But isn't it just the -er suffix -- "forming derivative ns. with the
> general sense 'a man who has to do with (the thing denoted by the
> primary n.)'" -- that one is concerned with?
>        actor -- actress
>        blogger --  blogress
>        troller [not "troll"] -- trolless
>        monster -- monstrous
>
> Therefore I'm not concerned about "alien".
>
> In passing, "blogress" has an added appeal for me -- a hint of anti-progress.
>
> Joel
>
> At 3/10/2012 05:35 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>> http://goo.gl/Bq2lj
>>> The implication is that by treating Fluke with disrespect, Landsburg
>>> has behaved unethically. That's bunk, as blogress Ann Althouse
>>> (herself a professor) points out: ...
>> Turns out to be, unsurprisingly, fairly common, even though the gendered
>> version was, of course, created by analogy. I guess, the suffix remains
>> productive. Now, what's the female version of "troll"? "monster"?
>> "alien"? I have no doubt that future antropolinguists, investigating
>> Prehistoric 21st Century English, will reconstruct them the same way we
>> reconstruct Proto-Polynesian words.
>>
>>      VS-)

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