Female Quiz Master

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi.

This is James Cowan calling from Seattle.

James?

Hi, James. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha.

Welcome. What’s going on?

I am a trivia host, like a pub quiz night host here in Seattle.

And I’ve been doing that for a while.

And I was thinking the other day about the word quiz master, which is kind of the default term a lot of people use for the person who especially both writes and hosts the quiz or just hosts the quiz.

And it occurred to me at one point, you know, the assumption behind quiz master, at least when I hear the word, is that that’s a guy most of the time, because in part, because I think statistically, it’s probably heavily slanted that way, but also because the word master is itself, you know, a fairly male gendered word.

And I was thinking, you know, well, is there a good gender neutral or at least, you know, not so heavily slanted term for that?

And I couldn’t really come up with one.

And then I was also, you know, doing a little poking around.

And, of course, there are parallel words like grandmaster for chess or other games where they’ve apparently like that has.

I don’t know if it’s officially become gender neutral, but the women who are, you know, of that rank are just called grandmasters and not something else.

Or even, you know, it’s kind of going out of vogue, but the term webmaster again.

But anyway, with all of those, my question is, if you look up the word master or any of those, I even looked at, like, we have, our public library has access to the Oxford English Dictionary, which does have, as one of the tertiary definitions, you know, kind of a gender neutral, you know, master can be someone of either sex that is, you know, really good at what they do.

But there’s not really, you know, a good gender neutral, it seems to me, term.

So my question is really, you know, is that going the way of becoming the gender neutral term and my sticking on it is just, you know, old fashioned or, you know, going out of vogue?

Is that cause, I guess, for looking for a better term?

Well, James, I’ll tell you my opinion. I think it’s fine.

I think you’re talking about the difference between the term itself and the reality.

You pointed out that the majority are men, and I think that that’s a matter of reality and not the word itself.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, no, that makes sense.

And the other thing about quiz master, I think it would be fine applying to a man or woman because that is the trend overall in English across the world.

More and more of these gendered terms where the term applies to a specific role and the only difference is the gender.

They’re disappearing.

We’re not likely to say postmistress, for example, or aviatrix.

Terms like that, they’re gone.

It’s now postmaster and aviator.

In Hollywood, we’ve almost completed the transition to actor completely for men and women who act in movies and television.

There are a few little places where this is not happening.

But in general, the term is, it’s not that the women are adopting the male term.

The male term is losing its gender completely.

Yeah, I’m not bothered by having a bachelor’s degree.

Yeah, there we go, exactly like that.

And then master’s degree as well.

So quizmaster is totally fine.

And part of the reason you’re kind of stuck with quizmaster, as you pointed out with webmaster and other terms, is that mistress is so marked to mean something.

Yeah, that’s a good point.

It’s got all this kind of baggage referring to the other woman or referring to a dominant woman in a dominant submissive relationship or all this stuff here.

There’s kind of been a pejoration of some of the female terms over the years and a natural shift to the male term, which tends to be a little more value neutral and now also becoming gender neutral.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, the other thing that had occurred to me, the other similarity are words like firefighter instead of fireman or police officer instead of policeman, where, you know, that’s an area where it seems to me, at least in my experience, those are staying, I mean, policemen and firemen are staying fairly gendered and that they’re looking for.

But there’s also a good, you know, gender neutral alternative there that doesn’t really have any baggage or cost anything to use.

Exactly.

It’s not confusing. It’s not anything else.

You had a question that I really want to make sure that I answer.

You were asking if it was just you or that you were catching on these words because you’re old-fashioned or for some other reason.

And the reason that you’re catching on this kind of little difficulty in English is because the transition is not yet complete.

And this tends to be the case.

And this applies to all of our listeners.

When you find yourself catching on something, it’s like, wait, wait.

It’s like you put your brakes on for a moment.

There’s kind of a mental pause.

You’re like, is that right?

It’s usually because you’ve identified a change in transition that’s not yet complete.

Once it’s complete, you’ll stop remarking upon it and never notice it.

There’s a great book to recommend on this.

If you want to get a little wonky, Ann Curzan at the University of Michigan has written a book called Gender Shifts in the History of English.

It is exactly about this topic.

Oh, cool.

That sounds very good.

We’ll link to that on the website.

Maybe you can put in one of your quizzes.

You never know.

You never know when we’ll end up turning up something good.

Thanks, James.

Cool. Thanks very much, you guys.

Good talking with you. Bye-bye.

When you catch on something, when you get a pause in your brain and can’t figure out what caused it, we’re the ones who can help you figure that out, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.