h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Anyone else hate turning job titles into a gender specific/ gender free version?

I prefer to be a chairman, not a chairperson or chairwoman.
On the other hand, round here we have a postlady which I am happy about!

What about just 'Chair'?

Does that make you feel wooden?

I remember hearing a news item which said that some committee would be 'meeting under the chair of Lady Somebody'. I had visions of an aristocratic lady on a large chair (almost a throne) with a group of committee members clustered under it!

Royal Mail refers to them as 'Postperson or PostPersons' everybody else calls them 'Posties'. Sorted.

...or "chairthingy" as we have in SHADOW. (A811810)

Why do you name your chair after a day of the week?

B

There are almost always good alternatives to those ghastly 'person' titles:

Mail carrier instead of postperson
Server instead of waitperson
Firefighter instead of... did they ever use fireperson or just go straight to firefighter?

Personally I've got nothing against a postman being called a postman and a postlady (or woman) being called a postlady, nor a paperboy/papergirl, milkman/milkwoman, etc.

What about the PC / WPC thing in the police force? Why did we get WPC when PC is gender neutral?

I have to say I've never heard the term 'waitperson' ... surely they are waiters and waitresses ... always have been and always will be?

I think my personal number one hate must be 'spokesperson'. If they abbreviate it will they become 'spoke'?

Waitperson sprung up during the heyday of PC so that the terms waiter and waitress could be done away with. It's considered more gender-neutral that than waiter.

A Waitperson sounds like an officious employee of slimfast ...

I think there is an important distinction to be made between talking about a particular person, and talking about a post in general. If you are talking about a particular person, there is usually no problem with a gender specific noun, to identify them as chairman, or chairwoman, as appropriate.

There is more of an argument for having a generic job title to be either gender-neutral, or cover both genders, so either chairperson, or waiter/waitress. This would apply if you were advertising for someone to fill a job vacancy, or talking about the rules for a job ('the chairperson must wait until everyone has entered the room before....', or similar).

And as Gosho points out, there are usually good alternatives to the person suffix.

Quite so Silverfish

Whilst being no fan of over-zealous political correctness myself, I'd rather see the time spent on a project described as 'work-hours' rather than 'man-hours'.

Well of course, man does not = work!

Has anyone else noticed how they tend to use 'actor' to cover male and female acting persons now?

And 'author' to cover male and female writers. It's as if "they" (whoever "they" are!) think that a noun that is traditionally masculine can suddenly be used as a gender-neutral noun to describe the women who follow a particular occupation.

I did some checking this morning. My dictionary (Oxford English) defines actor as "performer of a role in plays, film, etc.", and author as "writer of books, essays, etc." As 'performer' and 'writer' are both gender-neutral words, I suppose it could be argued that 'actor' and 'author' are gender-neutral. I still feel more comfortable describing a woman as an 'actress' or 'authoress'.

Interestingly, waiter is defined as "a *man" who takes orders and serves food or drink" (my emphasis). In this case, there is no convenient gender-neutral term.

Given that originally actors & authors were exclusively male, I suppose the terms actress & authoress (ugh) were introduced to denote such 'strange women'.

Getting back to the waiter/waitress/server thing, I just came across this whilst doing some research for an entry:

Waiter/Waitress
What we used to call "servers"

Waitron
Coined in late '80's to avoid using "sexist" terms "Waiter/ Waitress". Nearly every server working back then claims inventing the term. Lost favor in '90's to "Server".