Waiter and actor (feminine nouns and masculine nouns)

[Tere]

I?ve always known waiter/waitress; actor/actress.

Nevertheless, I?ve recently seen some notes in a new textbook (by Clive Oxenden, Paul Seligson andLatham-Koenig - edition 2005) that explain waiter and actor may be applied both to men and women.

Is it ...so?

Something similar happened some time ago with words meaning shops and owners:

I used to say: She?s a hairdresser but
I went to the hairdresser?s.

Then I came to know we could leave the possesive (?s) out by saying "I went to the hairdresser"...hum...
I understood that had to be with time and common usage...
Could it be the same with actor/waiter?

Tere

Tere

[Jamie (K)]

When I was in art school, our feminist professors made us stop saying "sculptress", so we called both women and men "sculptors". I haven't heard "sculptress" in many years.

I have never heard a woman called a waiter, and I think that gender is so burned into the minds of Americans, when it comes to the words waiter and waitress, that they have begun avoiding the discomfort by calling them both servers. Nonetheless, most people still say waiter and waitress.

Feminists have also been trying to get people to stop saying actress, but even they feel such a need to designate the gender that most of the time they wind of saying "woman actor", which to me is just like saying actress.

[Yankee]

Hi Tere

All the talk about words and gender has been going on for a long time. But it's not only gender that can get some people all riled up. There are all kinds of "politically correct" expressions and names for things. Some of them are accepted and take hold. Others don't. And as Jamie mentioned, some "politically incorrect" words are just so ingrained, people simply continue to use them. (No matter what the "Politically Correct Faction" wants people to say. )

By the way, there's been a little bit of discussion about this already:
http://www.english-test.net/forum/ftopic8809.html

Amy
_________________
Amy
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ESL teacher, translator, and a native speaker of American English

[Jamie (K)]

And sometimes they get very ridiculous with it, for example the New York State Education Department wanted schools to stop using the term "cancer patient" and start using "patient with cancer", which is the same thing but sounds more politically correct to someone for some reason. A lot of school systems and government agencies engage in this type of craziness.

Here is an article about that kind of thing:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110004691

Part of what spreads this nonsense around the country is textbook publishers who are trying to please the authorities in various states. In states like Michigan, local school districts decide which textbooks to use, but in states like Texas and California, a central committee decides which textbooks will be used by every school in the state. This means that the textbook publishers pander to every little whim of these committees, and the schools in the rest of the states have to suffer with the idiocy, to one extent or another.

My favorite restrictions are the ones that try to prevent children from being exposed to "stereotypes". When the publishers have to worry about those, they're afraid to show pictures of Asians studying, Latinos spending time with their families, elderly people getting sick, etc., because those are "stereotypes".

[Conchita]

[Jamie (K)]

[Conchita]

[Jamie (K)]

[Tere]