| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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Page 171
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| that suits you. Some people are comfortable using generic he but avoid the generic use of compounds ending in -man. Some people find compounds using master- to be sexist and avoid using the term fellow, as in fellow colleagues, to refer to women. Practice in these matters is mixed, and it would behoove us all to acknowledge the difficulty inherent in many of these usages and to agree to disagree. | 1 |
| Finally, it is important to remember that avoiding sexist terms and constructions is no guarantee that what you have written will be free of gender bias. Sexist stereotypes, such as the assumption that all nurses are women or that all executives are men, can seem like the status quo—the way the world “is”—especially when you are distracted by a deadline or concerned about some other feature of your writing, such as its organization or its tone. Sexist assumptions can be insidious. A headline that reads Allegations Embroil Financier and Woman may seem innocuous at first, but if the article shows the woman to be a financier as well, you have to wonder about the politics of the headline editor, who has assumed that a financier must naturally be a man and that a woman’s professional status is somehow not worth mentioning. | 2 |
| The trouble with gender bias is that it often takes real effort to uncover it, even in your own writing, and you have to train yourself to look for it. You can begin by reading the following entries. | 3 |
alumna / alumnus
| | Alumnae and alumni are women and men who have been reared or nourished by their alma mater, their “nourishing mother.” Alumnus, alumna, and alma are all derived from the Latin verb alere, “to nourish.” Alumnus is a masculine noun whose plural is alumni, and alumna is a feminine noun with the plural alumnae. Coeducational institutions usually use alumni for graduates of both sexes. But those who object to masculine forms in such cases prefer to use alumni and alumnae or the form alumnae/i, which is the choice of many women’s colleges that have begun to admit men. | 4 |
blond / brunet
| | Terms that came into English from French to designate hair color, such as the pairs blonde/blond and brunette/brunet, are sometimes treated in English as in French: the gender-marked form of the adjective or noun, ending in -e or -te, is used when referring to a female, and the non-gender-marked form is used when referring to a male. However, this has not always been the case. In fact, the history of these terms shows a mixed usage. As early as 1481 the adjective blounde was used of men’s hair, and in 1683 Prince George of Denmark was described as being blonde. In 1860 George Eliot wrote of “the blond girl,” and in the 1930s James Thurber wrote, “He was a quiet, amiable blonde youth.” And there are numerous citations in modern prose of blond referring to females. | 5 |
| Recently, the usage of blond or brunet to refer to members of either sex has become more widespread among writers. This trend makes sense when you consider other French-derived words that have more recently come into wide usage in English and can refer to either males or females: entrepreneur, | 6 |
| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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