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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1837 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 9, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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People are assholes. Also I haven't heard / seen the word "Jewess" in a long time.

They made us add the feminine version to every job description, but took it from the races (jewess, negress) and any other romantically relevant context (can’t tell compatibility from pronouns anymore). They de-sexed the sex and sexed the work.

Although you raise a point I've found interesting: the arbitrariness of how some individual national demonyms encode gender (Irishman, Frenchman) and others don't (Nigerian, American). I presume it's entirely downstream of euphony, but it's still funny to think about. Also funny to think that it might be easier to come out as non-binary if you're American than if you're Irish ("Bambie Thug" is an Irishwoman, not an Irishthey; whereas Sam Brinton is just an "American").

Well, truth be told, I was thinking of my native germany, where job offers as well as official new language guidelines require phrasing of the type “workers …. and workerinnen” for everything.

Ah, interesting. Funnily enough, one of the few words in the Irish language I think the average Irish person could be expected to recognise and understand is "beangarda", meaning a female police officer (as opposed to garda, which is a male police officer).

They made us add the feminine version to every job description

Many newspaper style guides, such as the Guardian's, explicitly recommend deprecating terms like "actress" and using "actor" as gender-neutral:

Use for both male and female actors; do not use actress except when in the name of an award, eg Oscar for best actress. The Guardian’s view is that actress comes into the same category as authoress, comedienne, manageress, “lady doctor”, “male nurse” and similar obsolete terms that date from a time when professions were largely the preserve of one sex (usually men). As Whoopi Goldberg put it in an interview with the paper: “An actress can only play a woman. I’m an actor – I can play anything.”

There is normally no need to differentiate between the sexes – and if there is, the words male and female are perfectly adequate: Lady Gaga won a Brit in 2010 for best international female artist, not artiste, chanteuse, or songstress.

As always, use common sense: a piece about the late film director Carlo Ponti was edited to say that in his early career he was “already a man with a good eye for pretty actors ...” As the readers’ editor pointed out in the subsequent clarification: “This was one of those occasions when the word ‘actresses’ might have been used”

As noted by the titular character of Tár, some of these gendered terms never caught on in the first place: I've never heard any spacefaring woman referred to as an "astronette".

Could you guys stop piling on a muzzled man by making the same point?

They made us add the feminine version to every job description,

If anything "they" have been trying to strip out the gender entirely from job descriptions. Postal worker instead of mailman, calling all actresses actors, stewardess to flight attendant. Etc.

Did “they”?

Post about specific groups or specific people. If you can’t do so without waging the culture war in the fun thread…don’t.

I thought generally unisex terms had become mainstream. At least in Hollywood, no one's idea of a traditional stronghold, terms like "actor" (rather than actress) were for a time preferred (I'm interested to see what will happen if a transsexual person --MtF or FtM--wins best Actress or whatever.)

Actually I'm not that interested.

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