blogress

[Joel S. Berson]

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-)
>
>PS: Yes, if anyone's having any doubts, most of this post--aside from
>the citation--is meant to be a joke. The citation is quite real.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
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