attributive freshman

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:41 PM -0500 11/2/06, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On 11/2/06, FRITZ JUENGLING <juengling_fritz at salkeiz.k12.or.us> wrote:
>>
>>This has been a topic of conversation in our English Department for some
>>time.  I am happy with freshman (and am also a German speaker).  Do you
>>also want 'sophomores girls', 'juniors girls,' and 'seniors girls'?
>
>A more apt comparison would be the very frequent use of attributive
>"women" with plural heads: "women journalists", "women lawyers",
>"women surgeons", etc. "Freshmen" now seems to be traveling the same
>path. There aren't many other "-men" plurals that are common enough to
>get this treatment, but note that most major US dictionaries give the
>plural of "gentleman farmer" as "gentlemen farmers".
>
...and there's still "menservants", although in most cases the
counterpart of a nominal compound of the form "woman/women X" is a
phrase with "male":  male nurses, male prostitutes, or even (in local
contrast contexts) male doctors.  I'm not sure whether this reflects
an old aversion to using "female" in these collocations (although in
the 19th century you did get "female lawyers", not to mention
"petticoat physicians").  Robin Lakoff and others have discussed the
euphemistic flavor of "lady lawyer/judge/...", where the "lady"
doesn't really carry its semantic weight the way "gentleman" does in
"gentleman farmer".

LH

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