MS Word, PC
Evidently, MS Word finds my word choices offensive. I’d understand if I’d used a curse word, or some really nasty bigoted term, but this is the sentence it just is dying to make me change:
She subtly adjusts her posture and beckons toward the waitress, who does not seem perturbed that she missed Emily’s entrance.
Now, personally, I think that maybe it’s a little wordy, and it’s probably a little pretentious. And if we want to get technical, present tense isn’t the most popular for proper technical writing, and I’ve given MS Word permission to tell me when there are things in my document that maybe ain’t proper for an academic paper. I find it helpful when it underlines contractions in that helpful blue color, because my law professors find it irksome when I’m that informal.
But honest to God, Word is convinced that “waitress,” of all things, just ain’t grammatically correct. It insists that I change it to “server,” or preferably “waiter.” I guess its PC little brain wants me to be gender neutral. Except waiter isn’t gender neutral*, and server is a synonym, not a grammatically correct version of the term I chose.
What really baffles me, though, is that it has no problem if I replace “waitress” with “barmaid,” which is at least as sexist (actually it’s probably more sexist, considering that what barmaids put up with is a lot worse than what waitress have to handle, and the innate connotations that “maid” has as opposed to just the feminine ending of “ess”) and actually does come ready-made with a gender-neutral term that matches the word: bartender (which usually, where I’m from, does indicate a male, but its not as blatantly gendered as “waiter” for whatever reason).
I think what really bothers me, though, is that the underline isn’t the nifty blue of “you probably would sound more proper if…” but rather the hideous green of “you eff’d up your grammar there, pretty lady.”
* Some people seem to think that “waiter is the word and waitress is the female version of the gender neutral.” This is crap. Waiter is not gender neutral. It’s just that the “male” version of a lot of words is considered to apply to both in a case where you’re trying to be inclusive. There is no such thing as a gender neutral word where the “other version” is only one gender. At best, that’s a myth that the culture likes to propagate to pretend that it’s not sexist at its base.
Filed by Cally at March 18th, 2009 under Tags: gender, grammar, waiter, word