[Ads-l] Berkeley and gender neutral words

[Laurence Horn]

> On Jul 19, 2019, at 8:01 PM, Mark Mandel <markamandel at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> The Latin means "No one is an heir or a living person.”

Mark’s finger meant “of” rather than “or”; the claim as it stands is rather too strong.  More seriously, I don’t get the argument to replace “heir”, which is parallel to “actor” and arguably also to “poet”.  By all means, let’s dump “heiress”, “adventuress”, “actress”, “sculptress”, or “poetess”, although it could be (and has been) argued that “actress” performs a service that the others don’t, at least until sex-neutral casting becomes universal; the tradeoff for sex specification may be deemed worth it.  “Waitress” is another case, and I grant we all have different cutoff points. (Mine is rather different from Jon’s, for example.)  But the fact that “heiress” can be plausibly argued to be sexist on the grounds that it marks sex of the referent when it’s irrelevant, I don’t see why that consideration should infect “heir”, which as noted below really is just ‘one who’, on grounds of both usage and etymology.  

LH
> 
> On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, 4:35 PM ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> The word [*heir*] is correctly applied to either a male or a female,
>> although,
>> in the latter sense, heiress n.   has been in general use since 17th
>> cent. In Law a person is not called an heir to any property until,
>> through the death of its possessor, he becomes entitled to it (
>> *nemo est heres viventis*).
>> [End excerpt]
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org