>It's interesting to compare this with the deprecation in English of the term actress. Well, in Spanish the non-sexist attitude is to preserve the feminine form

>It's interesting to compare this with the deprecation in English of the term actress. Well, in Spanish the non-sexist attitude is to preserve the feminine forms (actriz for actress) and to come up with new explicit ones, exactly the opposite that is. So nope, there isn't a universal sociolinguistics that you can extract from the use of contemporary English and I don't understand how come anybody might expect such a thing. Exactly. Now that I think about it more, it's not so black-and-white in Russian. As I said above, the female form of "doctor" doesn't sound acceptable/neutral, but the female form of "football player" sounds completely neutral. So go figure.