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Last week, the Colorado hairstreak butterfly became our official state insect, thereby joining the blue spruce, bighorn sheep, lark bunting, culverwort, stegosaurus, etc. on the list of official state paraphernalia.
But in New Mexico, a perennial effort to designate an
official state question
again failed to pass.
The proposed question was Red or green?
, which
might also be phrased Colorado o verde?
(a licit
locution in New Mexico, where English is not the only
official language), and it is the question asked by the
waiter or waitress after you say I'll have some
chile.
New Mexico proponents say the question is asked
thousands of times every day throughout the territory, and
so it should be made official.
Just phrasing the above caused me to realize that there are some linguistic deficiencies which might be cured by an official designations.
Waiter or waitress
is an awkward locution. Often
the non-sexist substitution is waitperson,
which is
even worse. In a Vail newspaper, I see advertisements for
waitrons,
but that hasn't caught on outside the
Resort Belt.
We could get around the gender question by referring to
all waiters or waitresses as servants,
but then
there would be complaints that the presence of
servants
implies the presence of masters
or
mistresses,
and we'd have to deal with questions of
class as well as gender.
English offers several occupational suffixes to show
that we're talking about the person doing the work, not the
work itself: -er,
-ess
, -ist,
-ster
, -stress.
-er
comes from Latin, where it was -ary,
which survives in words like notary
and
reactionary.
This doesn't seem to be inherently
sexist. A writer,
programmer
or
carpenter
can come in any gender.
So there wouldn't be a problem with waiter
if we
didn't have waitress.
The ess
suffix
indicates femininity, and arrived in our language from the
French, who got it from the Latin suffix -issa,
which survives in names like Melissa.
The obvious solution is to ban the word waitress,
since it uses a gender-specific suffix, whereas
waiter
does not.
Another remedy would be to use a different suffix, such
as -ist.
There's no hint of gender in typist,
novelist
or anarchist,
and we'd get used to
waitist
a lot faster than waitron,
wait/er/ress
or waitperson.
However, the waitist question is not the only such
issue. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters,
Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America, generally
known as the Teamsters Union, recently announced that it
would like to find a less-sexist term than teamster
for its 1.4 million members.
Teamster
is archaic anyway. It means someone
who drives a team
of horses or mules. I suspect that
the vast majority of Teamsters, whatever their skills in
driving trucks, do not know a jehu from a jerk line.
They're Teamsters, not teamsters.
The -ster
suffix, if you trace it back, is not
masculine, but feminine. A spinster
was originally a
woman who spins thread on a spinning wheel (which had a
part called a distaff,
a word that came to mean
women in general.
)
Over the years, -ster
got applied to males, with
the result that men who sewed were seamsters
and
women seamstresses.
Since the -ster
suffix has a history of applying
to both sexes, and -stress
does not, we shouldn't
settle for eliminating waitress,
but all such
locutions.
The woman who ran the post office in Parshall, Colo.,
when I lived in nearby Kremmling, posted a sign which said
she was the postmaster
(her official title), not the
postmistress,
and further observed that there were
no editresses
or publishresses.
Anyway, I hope our legislature, in the few remaining
days of this session, can come up with something useful in
the official-designation line, so that we will never again
be troubled by horrors like waitron
and
waitperson.
Which brings us back to the official state question. If New Mexico ever adopts one, other states will have to keep up.
Some are easy. The official question of Texas:
Hollow-point or dum-dum?
Utah: Firing squad or
gallows?
New York: Your money or your life?
Washington: Will you be buying a representative or a
senator today?
Smaller jurisdictions could also adopt official
questions. The Kevorkian zones of Michigan: Monoxide or
Seconal?
Aspen: Gold card or platinum card?
Boulder: Non-smoking or non-smoking?
But for Colorado in general, I'm at a loss. We're a
fairly generic state, so perhaps generic official questions
like paper or plastic?
or regular or
high-test?
would work best.
Oh well. An official state question should make a good project for a fourth-grade class somewhere, and the ensuing discussion will keep our legislature out of trouble.
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