If you haven’t seen Hot Fuzz, it’s totally worth it. The main character, mocked by all his coworkers as being too goody-two-shoes, has actually read all the sensitivity training memos and insists that they use the correct terms: “police officer” instead of “policeman”. And it’s presented in a way that makes fun of the policeman-saying-people for being such idiots, rather than the police-officer-saying-man for being so PC. So if for no other reason, that endeared it to me. I mention this mostly as a way of trying to get myself off the hook for my crimes as outlined below…

Today, I had occassion to encounter a woman who needed to use our restroom. She had just been “reading meters in the area”. After she left, we all joked that she was probably the closest thing to a voter we would get all day (did you know it was an election day?), and I refered to her as a “metermaid”. As so as I did, I felt profoundly embarassed, like I’d just called her some unmentionable epithet and then backtracked in my head about why I used that term. At the time, I thought she was parking enforcement, which I only explain because I think of those three-wheeled vehicles when I think of the term “metermaid”. She was, in fact, an employee of the gas company, which would make her, in my mind, a “meter-reader”. Which may be just as [familiar/diminutive] and certainly not what she would say her job title was. But less sexist than “metermaid”. So my question to the MoF community at large is this: is metermaid a sexist term? Even if the maid in question is female? We’ve done a good job of changing firemen to firefighters, policemen to officers, and not assuming gender when a title (like “doctor”) gets used. But what about those job titles that are implicitly female, as opposed to implicitly male?

A nurse is one who nurses. Nursing is, originally, a specifically female activity. A father may, of course, nurse his child with a bottle; maybe even a bottle with milk from its mother; but not quite in the same way that we mean when a mother “nurses”. What is the ungendered (read: not implicitly female) title of a physician’s assistant? (Since even PA is not the same as RN.)

Metermaid sounds to me familiar in a way that I’m not comfortable with. Maid is too close to me to what I could never call a woman older than (or even the same age as!) me in German. There’s no “familiar” form of English anymore, but maid seems to cross a line that I know exists in other languages. I’m very uncomfortable with maids who clean peoples houses. But I’ve no problem with my sister’s employment of a woman who cleans her house and watches her kids. She doesn’t call her a maid or a nanny (I can’t think of what she does call her off the top of my head, usually her first name.)

In related experience, I sat in on a Latin class of my niece’s last week. They went through vocabulary, mostly pertaining to the bible or Mass, and then got to magister which the children dutifuly recited meant “teacher”, followed immediately by “magistra” which meant “woman teacher” according to the kids. I bristled. Firstly, it should be translated as “female” teacher, since female is an adjective and woman is a noun. But when I learned German, I learned that German had two words for teacher, “Lehrer” if the teacher was male and “Lehrerin” if the teacher was female. I take exception to learning that a hypothetical teacher should male unless specified “woman”. Especially since the class teacher was “woman”. In that context, it would actually make more sense to me that they be taught that teacher was female unless specified male, just to keep it consistant with their experience.

What are your thoughts about gendered language in other languages? Or diminutive/familiar language in English? Or female-gendered language that has not been replaced with neutral language (or am I just behind the 8 ball with the RN/meterreader thing?)?