1114: Genderless Masculine Words Dec 27, 2018

There is a growing demand for genderless words, and not just in English. In some languages, like German, this often appears as using forms derived from participles rather than using gendered nouns, and speakers of Spanish are beginning to use '-x' rather than the gendered '-o' or '-a', for instance. In English, which does not have grammatical gender, there is less of a need for this, but in the few cases where lexical entries differ based upon gender, such as 'actor' and 'actress' the way that people make this genderless is usually just to opt for the masculine form. Effectively this makes the word 'actor' seem as grammatically neutral, or simply is lacking gender, as with other jobs like 'clerk', even though actor began as masculine. Its masculinity doesn't really matter though, as many words that were once gendered like 'gangster' (originally feminine) or 'incognita' either become genderless or stop being used respectively. Notably, this does not happen with compounds ending in '-man', like 'salesman', and instead a new compound 'salesperson' is chosen.
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