Goody two shoes

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sat Mar 1 09:04:25 UTC 2014


On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 8:45 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> quoted:

> Mistress mayoress


She's not a female mayor, but merely the *wife* of the mayor, right? There
was (is?) a problem in Russian with the naming of women in professions
traditionally reserved to men in those cases in which the traditional
feminine form of the word for a person engaged in that profession named the
wife of a man in that profession and did not name a woman in that
profession, e,g,  _doktorsha_ "doctor's wife, 'mistress doctoress'." There
was a note about this problem in the Army Language School textbook, back in
the '50's.

Maybe Victor will bring me up to date.










language School
--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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