I just heard it used on NPR, non-ironically…which prompted some questions:
It’s not in my OED. I think I first heard it on 30 Rock, but I assumed it was a joke.
Is a “mentee” any different from a “protege”?
(I tried to think of legitimate -or/-ee pairings, and couldn’t come up with any. I know they’re out there but I’m just drawing a blank.)
[pedant]“Mentor” is a particularly bad candidate for back-formation, spawning “mentee”, because it started as a proper name – the name of Odysseus’ son’s tutor in The Odyssey. That it ends in -or leads to the whole false etymology thing.[/pedant]
If mentee is a word, is advisee also a word? I’m an advisor (or is that adviser?) for college students, but the spell-checker here doesn’t recognize it.
The M&W online dictionary shows mentee was first used 1965 (advisee is 1824). I think both sound weird.
Around the same time I raised the same objection. I was chided by my boss for being too “pederastic”. I assumed he meant pedantic, but couldn’t figure out a way to get out of that without making things worse. I was working with a bunch of very successful but not very literate people at the time. Later I discovered their success was largely due to their willingness to break rules far more important than ones of language.
O.M. f’ing. G. I would have been laughing for hours.
I see no reason to assume a false etymology.If you google for advice about naming fictional characters you’ll be hard pressed to find a list which doesn’t prioritize the meaning of the name. Homer spoke Latin, he needed to name a character who was a tutor. So he chose a root meaning and added “-or” to save himself some exposition. Lord knows he had a serious length problem to contend with.
His result was so appropriate that we adopted it as the term for that role. So why should it be out of bounds for us to extrapolate the form to define the relationship?
Most people find “protege” to be needlessly condescending. It brings up unfortunate connotations of “Golden Age” Hollywood producers and their companions for whom “ingenue” or simply “clueless mistress” would have been more accurate. “Protege” was the polite euphemism. So for women being mentored by men, this term is especially disquieting.
“Mentee” is awkward, but I think its the best we’ve got for the moment.
Actually, a more experienced lawyer would acknowledge that before a conviction, the
physical act of fucking and the required mental elements that must be associated with it for the fucking to constitute the offence of rape have not, at that time, been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and so they should have called them the alleged fuckor and the alleged fuckee.
Can’t pretty much any word be coined by adding -ee to mean ‘a person who is the direct object of some action’? We create neologisms all the time that aren’t in the dictionary.
While there are classic examples of -ee and -or words that everyone uses in speech, I could create a new one using those endings with a meaning that people would pretty much understand without a formal definition. If I say “taxor” and “taxee” you know what I mean.
As for mentee specifically… I’m not sure any other words mean exactly the same thing to me. Protege was suggested, but to me a protege is as much about the prestige and influence of the mentor - like the Hollywood producer who helps a favored actor get good roles. When I think mentor/mentee, I’m thinking more about a coaching or educational relationship. Maybe this is the kind of language drift where protege used to mean something different and now we need a new word for the old meaning?
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