Heard on The Judges: "bartend(e)ress"

[Damien Hall]

James said:

'This past weekend the Screen Actors' Guild gave out its awards, including
"Best Female Actor", so we have to assume it is now official.'

For them, perhaps, but I note that both the Oscars:

http://www.oscar.com/nominees/?pn=nominees

and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA):

http://www.bafta.org/awards/film/film-nominations-in-2009,657,BA.html

use 'actress' (their categories for female actors in leading roles are
called '(Best) Actress in a Leading Role' and '(Best) Leading Actress'
respectively).

I was going to post about this before and say that the BrE tendency was
still to refer to female actors as actresses, but my research was
overshadowed by Mark's excellent figures on it, and, anyway, when I did
Google searches on 'I am / She is an actor / actress' restricting the
search to <... .uk> sites, the figures didn't bear me out.

I replicated Ron's previous searches, but with my restricted searches, and
these were the results:

RON
I am an actress    52,400
She is an actress  93,000
I am an actor      93,000
She is an actor    10,800

Ratio of 'She is an actress' to 'She is an actor'
= 93,000 / 10,800
= 1:8.61

DAMIEN (search restricted to .uk sites)
I am an actress    444
She is an actress  1,860
I am an actor      871
She is an actor    354

Ratio of 'She is an actress' to 'She is an actor'
= 1,860 / 354
= 1:5.25

The usual caveats about ghits apply, of course, with the added one that you
don't know who is posting to any site, not even ones based in the UK (the
assumption of the search is that by restricting it to .uk sites I will get
at least a greater proportion of hits from the UK).

Anyway, these results were surprising to me: if it had really been true
that UK-based people use 'actress' more than 'female actor', you would have
expected the UK ratio of 'She is an actress' to 'She is an actor' to be
higher than the general, non-restricted search one. I presume that the
conclusion to draw from that is that BrE is also taking in (what I think
is) the incoming variant, 'female actor'; on the other hand, what I think
is considered the main British film and TV award organisation still uses
'actress', as do the Oscars themselves. But it's clearly a situation in
flux; the whole Royal Academy of Dramatic Art site

http://www.rada.org

contains only 7 mentions of the word 'actress', and they refer to members
of the acting profession collectively as 'actors' (not 'actors and
actresses').

Damien

--
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
York YO10 5DD
UK

Tel. (office) 01904 432665
     (mobile) 0771 853 5634
Fax  01904 432673
http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb/

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