My pet peeve in that general direction is “unisex”. Which word has now mostly fallen out of favor but was big in the early days of gender consciousness in the 1970s.
Officially, a “unisex” bathroom is one that either sex can use, albeit not at the same time. Sure seems to me that ought to be “multisex”. IMO a “unisex” bathroom is one used by one kind or the other; the traditional men’s or women’s rooms are each unisex; just for different single sexes. one used by both? Multisex.
A “unisex” hair cuttery does both mens’ & women’s hair in the usual gender-identified styles. Nope, IMO that’s a “multisex” salon. A unisex salon would cut everyone’s hair the same.
Couldn’t “uni” be short for “universal”?
ETA
Looks like it could be “one” or “all”
The term ‘unisex’ was coined as a neologism in the 1960s and was used fairly informally. The combining prefixuni- is from Latin unus, meaning one or single. However, ‘unisex’ seems to have been influenced by words such as united and universal, in which uni- takes the related sense shared. Unisex then means shared by sexes.[3]
Once a word, or an afffix of a word, takes on both the meanings of “one” and “all”, it seems maybe it’s time to retire that word / affix as irretrievably rendered useless.
Though I took the “unisex” in “unisex bathrooms” or “unisex clothing” to mean “this one is for both/all sexes. There aren’t two separate versions; there’s only one version.”
In a live comedy sketch I remember from like 40 years ago there was a gag about a hairdresser’s deciding to announce themselves as a “bisexual salon” since they no longered catered to only one…
Forming compound nouns denoting the whole range or totality of what is indicated by the first element.
So it means, one totality, or everything. But the “uni” still means “one”. It’s a mangling of the prefix, using it in the opposite way that it means, and the gripe about it made here is completely understandable.
Some portmanteaus are more successful than others. Sometimes they don’t really work even though they manage to catch on (if only temporarily).
Imagine I wanted to come up with a description of a shirt which is “extra small size” and so I shortened it to an “extrasize shirt”. You’d think it was a really big shirt when it’s the opposite. That’s pretty much what’s going on with the term “unisex”.
“Shut up and eat your shiksa.” From Woody Allen’s Sleeper. It’s in the future; they were trying to get him to regain his memories, and the movie used a lot of words wrong.
There are several Yiddish words that have entered the English language as cutesy expressions, but are actually horribly offensive in Yiddish. “Schmuck”, for example, is an extremely rude word for “penis”.
