Words like murderess and aviatrix were always very uncommon, even in their heyday. Very few people in this world either kill people illegally or have the skills to fly an airplane (and most of both sorts of people are male) and we have little need to refer to them on a regular basis. If you’re trying to root out gendered language from your vocabulary, these will be the first to go.
On the other hand, most of us visit restaurants or cafes frequently, and watch people acting on TV or movies multiple times a week. It takes a deal of effort to excise frequently used words like ‘waitress’ or ‘actress’ , so many people don’t bother … leading to them not sounding ‘wrong’ or ‘weird’, leading to even fewer people feeling the need to stop using them … and so on and so on.
The pattern of gendered words in the English language is in any case highly illogical. Why do we have ‘shepherdess’ and ‘huntress’ but not ‘farmeress’, ‘cookess’ or ‘bakeress’? Why do we (or did we) have ‘authoress’ and ‘poetess’ but never ‘artistess’?
Technically, it does provide a bit more information. Because over 89% of murders are done by males, a female murderer is pretty rare. So it’s quite reasonable for a reader to assume that ‘murderer’ refers to a male. Saying ‘murderess’ specifically identifies the person as one of those very rare female murderers.
This probably wouldn’t be true in other occupations where there is a more equal division of the genders. Like server, or cook, or teacher (odd, how few I can think of).
But ‘murderess’ still seems rather quaint (and slightly sexist) to me.
But you don’t need to identify the sex of the murderer unless her sex is pertinent to the point that you’re making. “Murderess” doesn’t just identify the sex of the murderer; it calls attention to it.
So what? Is the fear that by identifying a woman as a murderer it will cause everyone to begin to assume that women are inordinately murderous? Or that women are somehow lesser than men or not to be taken as seriously as men if a woman can be shown to have murdered somebody?
The whole gendered word issue is silly, in my opinion. In the course of human events it often becomes necessary to use a word that denotes the subject’s sex. It’s inescapable.
And not only that, but if I were a woman I’d be quite annoyed at the idea I had to be protected from someone learning what sex I was, with the underlying motive being that I would automatically be considered lesser somehow if it became known I was a woman. The PC police are shooting themselves in the foot with this one.
I used to be a telephone installer. My actual title was “installer/repairman” and when I rang people’s doorbells I would say, “Telephone man!” (Okay, intercoms, or when they asked through the door who it was.) Even though I am not a man. It was just easier. The fact that I was female was irrelevant to the job. People were expecting a telephone guy who would put their phone in–that’s what they got.
Now I supposed the gender neutral version would be “Installer/repairer,” and I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t have gone that way. Still easier to say “telephone man!” at the door though.
Especially in print, calling attention to a woman being a murderess seems particularly redundant now days. All news stories will carry her name and description, usually within the first paragraph, and the article will for the most part, be accompanied by photos and increasingly, videos. It’s not only seems archaically sexist, but an even bigger push at sensationalism. “Oh my gosh! A WOMAN committed a murder!
< clutches pearls > Read our story alllllll about it!!”
Good point, but Garbage man is easily replaced by trash collector, which really isn’t much longer. Gunman and hitman? Hitman can be replaced by hired assassin, or hired thug, but it is longer. Hitperson just sounds stupid, as does gunperson. I suppose you could try to replace gunman with gunner.
You are totally missing the point. No one is upset that using the word “murderess” breaks confidentiality or reveals secrets. In fact, in the vast majority of contexts, including the one in the other thread when this first came up, the identity and gender of the killer was clearly and openly and repeatedly stated.
The objection is that by having a “main” word, murderer, which is generically used when the gender is unknown, and which is used in the plural for a mixed gender group, and which is also used as the male singular; and also having a word for the female singular, then the language itself is pointing out and supporting the idea that men are the norm and women are the exception.
It’s a carryover from the days when men were clearly and legally more important, filled all the important roles and jobs, and it was a surprising exception when you encountered a woman doing X, where X was any number of different important and prominent things.
And in addition, that sort of language perpetuates the idea that a person’s sex is such an important determinant of their character that it must always be presented as part of the information that is used to describe them.
Consider “On my way to the airport this morning, the cab driver got lost, and I nearly missed my flight” vs “On my way to the airport this morning, the Asian cab driver got lost, and I nearly missed my flight”. A lot of people would agree that including the race of the cab driver in the second sentence is off-putting and borderline racist. Why does the race matter? So in contexts when the race doesn’t matter, it shouldn’t be included. In contexts where the sex doesn’t matter, it shouldn’t be included… but gendered language prevents that from happening.
One final way to describe it: Imagine if someone were talking to you, and every time that they mentioned any person, they added “who was male” or “who was female”, even when it seemed totally ancillary to the story at hand. Wouldn’t that seem a bit weird and archaic? Gendered words force everyone to do that all the time. That’s what’s wrong with them.
My suggestion to fix this: let’s let the suffix “-er” apply either to gender-nondetermined people OR to women. If we’re talking specifically about a man, let’s use the suffix “-bro.”
Thus, the woman referred to above was a murderer. OJ Simpson was a murderbro.
There are plenty of workers in the United States. One such workbro is Clyde Johnston of Poughkeepsie.
Although most aviators in the 20th century wore goggles, James Smith, an aviabro from Washington, wore a full diver’s helmet, this despite his inexperience as a divebro.
It’s not at all jarring, is it, to have the gender pointed out by the suffix.
We don’t even have to go there. I just watched a poor Sikh man being called a raghead, like three weeks ago. But I guess it’s ok to call anyone a raghead, you know, because you made your own choice in language.
Yeah, the idea that it’s “whining” to think, and talk, critically about word choices is asinine. It’s a perfectly legitimate thing to discuss, and whining about its discussion is an absurd thing to do.
You evidently haven’t been paying attention to the news recently, or you’d see plenty of examples of gunmen being called by the new standard term, “shooter”. Likewise, hitmen are called “contract killers”, and garbagemen are “refuse collection crews” or “refuse collectors”.
This is part of a general and quite longstanding trend of shifting job descriptions away from generic “-man” or “-woman” endings to agent nouns that are actually descriptive of the job.
E.g., you don’t take your dirty clothes to a “washerwoman” any more, but to a “laundry” or a “cleaner”, because they launder or clean the clothes. The person who carries your mail is the “mail carrier”, not the “mailman”. The person who attends on you during your flight is a “flight attendant”, not a “stewardess”. The person who cleans your house is a “housecleaner”, not a “charwoman”. The person who drives your taxi is a “taxi driver” or “cab driver”, not a “taximan”. The person who inspects your parking compliance is a “parking inspector”, not a “meter maid”.
While the gendered terms may hang on in colloquial usage to varying extents, they’re being replaced by non-gendered terms that are both more convenient and more descriptive. Meanwhile, extraneous feminine suffixes on general agent nouns are also being dropped. We no longer say “Jewess” when we mean a female Jew, or “poetess” when we mean a female poet, or “traitress” when we mean a female traitor. “Murderess” is on its way to the same ash heap of etymological history, and as far as most English speakers are concerned, has already been consigned to it.
Not a single person has whined about its usage. They’ve only brought up the, oh, million things we have here. The only whining I’ve seen, has been from the crowd who got upset that others gave their personal opinion (aimed at an article, no less – not a person on this board at all) that it was stupid. Or outdated or sexist or… Take your pick.
The word “murderess” strikes me as so dated that I’d advise against using it unless you’re deliberately writing in an antiquated style. Attempting to use it seriously when you’re not writing a period drama or something seems likely to produce a “Murderess? WTF, Grandpa?” reaction.
Beyond merely sounding old-fashioned, using an outdated gendered term may be seen as placing special, unnecessary emphasis on gender and invites the interpretation (or misinterpretation, as the case may be) that one holds outdated views about gender. So unless that’s what you’re going for, it’s another good reason to avoid such terms.
While “actress” has the very same gendered ending as “murderess”, it is still a commonly used term. That’s why it’s unlikely to cause your audience to wonder if that particular word was chosen because you’re weirdly out-of-touch or an outright sexist.
And that’s what they themselves use, in their most distinguished situation: the Academy Award for “Best Actress in a Leading Role”, “Best Actress in a supporting Role”.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences changes that to "“Best Female Actor in a Leading Role”, then it will clearly be time for the rest of us to recognize ‘actress’ as a dated, archaic term.