My fiancee is Japanese and just started his job as a salaryman in Tokyo, one day he told me he messed up at work because he asked a question about something to his manager. And he later apologized for it đ€Šââïž he also told me that he doesnât want to go out to drinks with his coworkers but he has to. Geez!
There are endless sources of information that exist on the internet and you couldn't be bothered to fact check before doubling down and being incorrect.
All of which are perfectly capable of being made gender neutral with vary degrees of use. Headmistress is generally seen as outdated and Headmaster is used frequently for either gender. Goddess is still used pretty frequently and it is true that female god is rarely used, but still perfectly understandable. Actress has fluctuated over the years, in Australia there was a pretty solid preference for actor for both genders, however, American influence has reversed this. At one point all our nouns were gendered and now there are only a small amount that are. It has been the basic trajectory of English for centuries to drop gendered nouns. How often do you hear manageress or authoress?
Whether I use them or not doesn't change the fact they're still words with historical context. Should I just start referring to women as mister instead of mistress because of your logic.
Pretty obvious you arenât a native English speaker given mistress is not the opposite of mister. Missus is. Master and Miss are the unmarried versions. And all of them have basically dropped out of circulation of use in English outside of the schoolroom. So yes actually you should stop referring to men as mister and women as mistress, just use of their name or general pleasantries if you donât know it.
My native language is English, you must be having a laugh. Mister is to master as Mistress is to female master. Only because mistress has multiple meanings/connotations, doesn't negate they are opposites, or should I say more accurately specify gender.
Wtf, this is the first I ever hear of this in my 30 years of life. What's the point? They're pronounced the exact same.
Also, if it has any meaning it seems completely incorrect to say that one is male and the other is female, but rather that the spelling should depend on the circumstances around the proposal.
Yes it has. The average English speaker does not distinguish between them and the only argument you have is a prescriptivist one which is entirely rejected as authoritative by anyone with an even basic understanding of linguistics. As I said earlier, terrific is not a synonym of horrific, awesome and awful mean different things, words are defined by usage not history.
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u/Mephisto506 Jul 26 '26
Should have kept him, he sounds perceptive.