[Ads-l] Berkeley and gender neutral words

[Jonathan Lighter]

"Goddess" is somehow doing well.

The neutrality craze is based in part on the elementary fallacy that a
word's meaning is dictated by its etymology.  Another significant basis is
the a priori belief that speakers of English are as sensitive to nuance as
are a subset of people with Ph.Ds and must, in any case, be protected from
"-man" words, which are dangerously, irremediably sexist and malign.

JL

JL



On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 8:42 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> > 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]
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


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