Susan Roesgen: reportress

I don’t have much patience for some of the more radical assaults on language in the name of political correctness.  I went to college with a chick (heh) who used “womyn,” and wanted to rid the language of words like “seminar” because of its heinously male etymology.  She had a gender-neutral pronoun for he/she that I forget.

She also came to class one morning with a rug burn on her forehead.  But I digress.

There are a number of gender-neutral occupational terms I prefer because I find them more descriptive.  I like “firefighter” and “police officer,” for example.  I’ll admit that I’ve hung onto “stewardess” a bit, mostly because people who are upset by it are often comically so.  Still, I can usually hoist “flight attendant” without a problem.

My friend Saintseester made a casual remark last month that has continued to entertain me greatly.  Call it a gender-specific backwardly-constructed neologism, directed at a person exhibiting a negative stereotype (in this case, that of the hysterical woman):

She called her a reportress.

That’s genius shtick.

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