Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Another annoying gnat buzzing around my face

With the Oscar nominations just being announced, it reminded me of one of my peeves.

When are they going to drop that tired old term “actress”? There is already a gender-neutral term in use, it’s “actor,” meaning one who acts. This is not one of those make-it-politically-correct-by-creating-a-new-term nit-picks. The word “man” is not contained within the word “actor” as it is in the job titles Spokes-man, Chair-man, and Congress-man. And we don’t have directresses, editresses, artistesses, photographresses, designresses, doctresses... see how silly it is?

I do see the term webmistress a lot, but I don’t use it (any more than I use designress or illustratress). What am I? Married to a website? Having an affair with it? Being "kept" by a sugar daddy? Cut it out.

(If you are going to remind me that Mrs. is short for "mistress", go ahead. I also hate the term Mrs. (Missus).

2 comments:

Ptelea said...

I can't decide what to call myself in my new position as person in charge of a website. I have the same feelings you do about webmistress but then I don't really feel like I have mastered it yet either.(in fact, I know I haven't!!)

Blueberry said...

I will never master that job in multiple lifetimes. The other aspect of it is that they are never finished, so they go on and on -- infinity.