The Male Stewardess Anomaly

About a month ago, I was with a great group of young adults at a swanky shake shop (and when I say swanky, I really just mean that there were shakes with Reese's peanut butter cups). Those on my end of the long pieced-together table were among the silliest, funniest people I'd had the pleasure of meeting for some time. I'd have suspected it was the sugar if it hadn't already started before they ordered.

I can't even recall most of what came up in the course of our conversation, but I'm sure we invented a few words of our own. The bizarre factor escalated enough that my boyfriend and the man across from him (who together bridged the Bizarre Table and the Fun But Far Less Troublesome Table) began a secret experiment, interjecting random once-off statements just to see where we would fly with them.

Come to think of it, that's where the jet-propelled cows came from.


Camo Cow is ace at hiding a jetpack.

In any case, at some point the chat came 'round to flight attendants. (No segue implied; trust me, there was none.) And in the midst of the tangent, someone dropped the phrase "male stewardess."

"There's a word for that," someone else interrupted: "Steward."

All perfectly true. While many people opt for a gender-neutral term like "flight attendant," both "steward" and "stewardess" are valid. For some occupations, I've noticed a potential increase in referring to women in the position by the traditionally masculine title, such as "actor" rather than "actress," what I take to be an intended neutralizer.

Such gender-specific nouns are their own breed of beast, but what I find no less debatable is the use of a modifier, as in a "male nurse." As long as we see this as necessary, there can never be understanding of neutrality.

I used to be (...am?) a word snob. I loved words - loved discovering them and learning how to use them. I loved definitions and connotations and semantics, and sometimes it seemed like spelling was the only test that didn't strike fear into my heart.

But as I've gotten older (and as my spelling skills have increasingly come into question), I've grown into a new sort of linguistic love.

I love the power of words: a phenomenal extension of definitions, connotations, and semantics. I love the power that they hold and the power that we are able to bestow upon them.

But people often assume that a word can have only a certain meaning, and sometimes they're afraid to bend it. It may be a way of honoring the tradition and background of the word, but it may also cheat it of a little bit of modern meaning. While we can't weaken all of our language with linguistic anarchy, we need to remember that we have power over how we use it. We shape our language as much as our language shapes us.

We limit people. We limit ourselves.

When we discussed this at the table, one person furrowed her brow in uncertainty. "'Nurse' for a male still sounds weird."

"It won't," I said, "if people use the word that way."