His and Hers

The word "marquess" still throws me for a loop, because the "-ess" suffix is so inextricably bound to women that it's jarring to find it apparently part of a word that refers to a man. The word "marquess", of course, isn't suffixed with anything; it's an alteration of the French word "marquis" that originally came into English as "marques" and then took the second "-s" as its pronunciation changed.

The great majority of the time, though, "-ess" at the end of a word--particularly words that are clearly nouns if the suffix is removed--denotes a woman. I once got into a huge online argument about the word "actress". I was in favour of it; most of the other participants in the scrum were not. I'm not alone in finding it a useful word, I know, but gender-specific words (at least those with suffixes) appear to be falling out of favour, so I'd like to issue a defense of the word, if not the suffix itself.

Now, Henry Fowler's classic "Modern English Usage" maintains that such gender-suffixed words are valuable because they compact more information into a single word. (This view has very much fallen out of favour, since the modern point of view is that we don't generally need to know if, say, a sculptor is male or female, and so "sculptress" has a ghettoizing, demeaning effect.) I'm not going to follow Fowler's argument, because I have another: that actors and actresses are not interchangeable.

When a man plays the part of a woman or vice versa, it's invariably a stunt of some sort. It wasn't always the case; before women were permitted on the stage, boys and men played all parts, male and female, and this was considered just another example of the suspension of disbelief necessary to make theatre possible. But nowadays, as we have done for a few hundred years now, we consider the roles of actresses and actors to be different. When we go to see "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", we know that Brad Pitt will be playing the mister and Angelina Jolie will be the missus: if it were the other way around, it would be strange, shocking, and/or jokey. The acting roles of men and women, for better or for worse, are simply not the same, and so the separate words "actor" and "actress" are both useful to us.

Naturally, other words such as "Jewess" and "Negress" have rightly fallen out of favour; feminist commentators have noticed that we don't have the parallel words "Protestantess" and "Whitess". And most of the words do in fact make a distinction that isn't necessary; poets and authors do the same job regardless of their sex, so "poetess" or "authoress" has the stench of condescension about it. It's entirely possible that the same will be said about actresses and actors in the future, and that the Oscars won't bother to have "Best Actor" and "Best Actress" statuettes, but simply put men and women in the same category. I continue to hold, nevertheless, that "actress" denotes a useful distinction, and I'll keep using it until someone surgically excises it from my brain. (And sometimes, all too often, we see the horrible construction "female actor", which merely goes to prove my point--that we consider "actor" to mean "male performer" and therefore have a use for the gendered word "actress".)

I'm also a fan of such Victoriana as "aviatrix" and "murderess". (Would Edward Gorey's "Neglected Murderesses of History" be nearly as amusing without the suffix?) I don't use them in any serious way, but I love the sound of them.