A question from my wife (who is a teacher):

Since the name of Telemachus' tutor has passed into a wider use and has gained currency as the verb form, to mentor (not with an r, guys), there has grown up an exceedingly ugly back-formation for the subject of these attentions. Is mentee permissable under any circumstances?

>not with an r

but we really need to know: is there a 'mentorate'?

is there a 'mentorate'?

Surely not? Mentors do it for free!

To use a derivative like "mentee" is to pop the lid off Pandora's Box and loose all manner of unfortunate "words" on an unsuspecting world. If mentor is used as a noun meaning wise counselor or guide, it soon becomes a verb meaning "to teach, to instruct, to direct." If nouns which end in -er or -or are facilely turned into indirect objects -- e.g. lessor/lessee, condemner/condemnee -- then it is a short step from "mentor" to "mentee."

Once the lid is off, one must make expect and accomodate the absurd constructions which will follow:

mentoration -- the act of guiding or teaching
mentorially -- in the style of a guide or teacher
enmentorment -- guiding or teaching
polymentoricity -- having many guides or teachers
mentorrhoea -- too many guides or teachers all talking at once.

Don't let this happen to a language you love.

Father Steve
(who posts only 1.375 times per day, on average)

Not to forget the real pain of mentoring: dysmentorrhea.

Mentors do it for free!

True! But is one who teaches mountain climbing a tormentor?

Ooh, tsuwm - you are surely not implying the foul calumny that we Brits might ever have a tendency to adulterate suffixes, are you?

And yes, I agree with you, Father - this way madness lies! Pandoramonium? I guess this is where my (doubtless arbitary) sense of euphony is my own guide - hate the sound of mentee, hate it with a passion. Actually, the more I think about the parallel words and others like legatee, the more I think I hate them all! Maybe I am merely a handicapee in this respect.

>tsuwm - you are surely not implying the foul calumny that we Brits might ever have a tendency to adulterate suffixes, are you?

hey! don't mention adultery to an OP!!

>Actually, the more I think about the parallel words and others like legatee, the more I think I hate them all!

Mav:

Words like this are what my wife, a recovering attorney, calls state of the art words. They come mainly from Latin, with a smattering of Anglo Saxon, and are used for very specific legal concepts.

One example is the pair words alienor and alienee. These are, respectively, the person who transfer property and the person to whom the property is transferred. Neither of these are terms you will use in your everyday conversations :)

Illustration:

A fellow I know rented a house from a very nice couple. Unfortunately, two months after he signed the three-year lease, the couple separated. During the ensuing very bitter battle, both of them are trying to collect the rent from him. There have been court battles, he has had credit problems, he's getting ulcers. Truly, another situation where one must confront the evil of two lessors.

My wife has eschewed the practice of law to raise a family, but is now going back to work as a customer service representative for a medium-sized mutual fund company here in Denver. Before leaving the legal profession, though, she left her mark. When she lived in Baltimore, she bought a condo right on the harbor. Weeks after the purchase was completed, Baltimore began a very large project to rehabilitate the waterfront area.

Peggy found the construction din at night so horrendous that she couldn't sleep. To no avail, she tried to get the construction limited to daylight hours. So she filled a class action. Yes, MY wife wrote what is now known widely in legal circles as Port Noise Complaint.

>One example is the pair words alienor and alienee

But don’t these words bear too much resemblance to alienate. It seems to me that the legal profession always tries to create a language that is not subject to misinterpretation, which is why there is sooooo much excess word baggage in most legal documents.

Oh, and tell you wife not to fret. I have a pal who is referred to as the "Westmount Square Breastfeeder Bylaw" instigator. I have seen her being stopped on the street with "aren't you that woman who refused to breastfeed her baby in the bathroom?" And it is amazing. You can tell which side of the debate they were on by the way they pronounce THAT.

One of my pet peeves is the illogical use of the "ee" suffix to denote one doing something instead of being the object of an action. "Inductee", "amputee", "transferee", etc. may not be elegant, but you know where they stand, grammatically speaking. But "escapee"?? Since it obviously means, one who is escaping or has escaped, how does it come to have that suffix? If a noun has to be made from "escape" it should be "escaper" or "escapist" (ugh! better to conclude that no such noun has to be made.) There are others along this line which escape me at the moment.

Your mention of the large animals which swim in the Florida waters (there is one which visits the Chesapeake Bay from time to time) reminds me of my departed father-in-law (he should rest in peace)(it's 20 minutes from being All Souls Day). He used to refer to them as Manichees, which gives you a chuckle if you know what a Manichee is/was.

windwords,

the only word for jargon I can think of that includes 'art' is pretty much of a stretch: ARgoT
<shrugs>

I think "terms of art" is the expression you're looking for, windword.

Bingley

Father Steve adjures us Don't let this happen to a language you love.*

Really! Next thing you know people will be leaving the inflectional suffixes off of words and we'll have to resort to word order or prepositions or some such neoplastic tommy-rot to understand what other people mean.

Just out of curiosity, what's so ugly about mentee? Mentor has taken on a meaning different nor that of teacher and student doesn't differentiate between the the recipient of teaching (Oooh, ooh, ooooh, teachee) and that of mentoring.

*This is just the sort of stuff that makes me love the language

*This is just the sort of stuff that makes me love the language

nah, you'm just a awkid cussee

One of Father Steve's back-formations:

polymentoricity -- having many guides or teachers

It runs trippingly off the tongue. It is virtually meaningless. It is polysyllabic. It has all the right qualifications for a word which just begs to be dropped into conversations regardless of context or audience.

I shall use it all the time!

e.g. No, I know that the suppliers haven't done what they said they would. I think that this just another example of the polymentoricity of the relationship, don't you?

I am certain to use this as one of the hudred or so other meaningless words that will grace the title for my PhD dissertation. When HELL freezes over!! My half-brother has a PhD in education and his dissertation has exactly null content. A hundred and fifty pages of absolute BS!

I'm happy with the lack of education that I have

The -ee ending seems in English to be passive in sense, since we have pairs like employer/employee; but the passive use derives (in French, Latin, and English) from the fact that it's a past participle: I have escaped. With a transitive verb, it serves both grammatical functions: I have employed; I have been employed.

I regard escapee as the plain English word for it, and wince at the ugly escaper occasionally substituted for it.

Escaper sounds like a neologism, because it's so unfamiliar, though in fact it's older, and escapee dates (in English) only from 1865.

...and escapee dates (in English) only from 1865.

No imagination, you Poms. The first prison escape in 1865? Huh!

hate the sound of mentee, hate it with a passion

Then are you suggesting that only women should golf? Womentee sounds even less euphonious.

My half-brother has a PhD in education and his dissertation has
exactly null content. A hundred and fifty pages of absolute BS!

What school requires a dissertation to get a BS? Which half of him is your brother?

GFF, WH USD T TK TH SHRT BS T SCHL.

The English "escapee" is related to the Italian "escapini" which means a person so small that they are able to squeeze out of confinement.
It may also be related to the French "escalope" which means a person who was going to get married by slipping out of town with the intended but changed his mind and slipped out of town alone.

fwiw

used in technical terms of Eng. law, was orig. an adaptation of the -é of certain AF. pa. pples., which were used as ns. The existence in legal AF. of pairs of correlative words like apelour appellor, apelé appellee, seems to have led in the first place to the invention of words in -ee parallel to those agent-nouns in -or which had been adapted in legal use from AF.; and subsequently the terminations -or and -ee were freely added to Eng. vb.-stems to form ns., those in -or denoting the agent, and those in -ee the passive party, in such transactions as are the object of legislative provision. The derivatives in -ee, however, unlike the AF. participial ns. after which they were modelled, have not usually a grammatically passive sense, but denote the ‘indirect object’ of the vbs. from which they are derived. Thus vendee is the person to whom a sale is made, indorsee the person in whose favour a draft, etc. is indorsed, lessee the person to whom property is let. With still greater departure from the original function of the suffix, payee denotes the person who is entitled to be paid, whether he be actually paid or not. In a few cases the suffix has been appended, not to a verb-stem in Eng. or AF., but to a Latin ppl. stem etymologically related to an Eng. n., as in legatee, a person to whom a legacy has been bequeathed.
2. The use of this suffix in law terms has been freq. imitated in the formation of humorous (chiefly) nonce-words, as jestee, cuttee, educatee, laughee, sendee, denoting the personal object of the verbs from which they are formed.
3. In a few words, as bargee, devotee, the suffix is employed app. arbitrarily.
4. -ee also appears in the English spelling of certain ns. adopted from mod. F. ppl. ns. in -é, as debauchee, refugee.

Father Steve, how lovely to see a post from you! And I know you won't be an escalope!
You-all--
Father Steve is getting married next Saturday, Nov. 10th!

Jackie is correct. I am more of a "cantaloupe" than an "escalope" in that six hundred people are invited to the wedding this Saturday. We will thereafter honeymoon for a fortnight during which I will eschew the net in favour of still greater delights. Blessings on y'all.

Father Steve (the almost married)

I am more of a "cantaloupe"... Father Steve (the almost married)
'N after that, you'll be a "Honey-do"...

Father Steve

If you canteloupe, you may as well stay and get married.

(Think about it!)

stales

(Think about it!)


Ah, the dry wit of the deliberately ambiguous pronoun.







Father Steve, I trust that the wedding festivities will include a rendition of Meloncholy Baby.

Father Steve:
Congratulations!
May your troubles be few and your blessings be more,
and nothing but happiness come in through your door.

Geez louise, you guys! The word makes perfect sense. CapK's "example" is just a strawman designed to make it look like it means nothing; it merely misuses the word. The closest I came to experiencing polymentoricity in my educational experience was in the Chem-Physics course I took in which a chemistry professor and and a physics professor took turns sitting in the back of the room fuming at the irrelevant drivel the other was spewing at us poor students.

Congratulations Father Steve. I hope you have many years of happiness together.

Bingley

May your troubles be few and your blessings be more,
and nothing but happiness come in through your door.
May your blessings be many and your troubles be few,
May you treasure the day you made One out of two.

CapK's "example" is just a strawman designed to make it look like it means nothing; it merely misuses the word.

It certainly misuses the word, but I didn't intend the example to make it look as if it meant nothing! It's just that if I waited for an opportunity to use the word in context, it would never happen!

if I waited for an opportunity to use the word in context, it would never happen!

Lucky you!

Lucky you!

If you say so, Dave. I have another opinion ....

Howya Maverick,

Mintea is a very acceptible word and is supposed ta be grate fer the digestion. Cheers.

>mintea

omigawd, we've got an Irish version of teD!?

You mean it's not teD? You could have fooled me. Did you check his profile? He's mental, he is.

> Tsuwm and Consuelo

I'm shocking that ye think I'm someone else - there's only one GallantTed. The bestest bear in the lexical business. I did see another TeD here all right, but we're not the same person/teddy bear. I suppose that makes us a proper pair of homonyms or somethin like that.

I predict GREAT things for the future of AWADtalk. No, GallantTed is not I. And I suspect that you will discover that he, like I, has kissed the Blarney Stone as a gratuitous gesture. My wife swears that I gave the Blarney Stone its gift!

TEd

Sounds like we are going to have a Kodiak moment. Or perhaps we should use a Polar-oid. Or a Brownie.

himself claims he is Tryen ta think of ways ta put manners on Goldilocks, -- who he also claims to live next to--

Now you're in the thick of it! of all the wild claims of grandure i have heard from irish men all over the world--yours is, far and away the most outlandish! and if you think the fine ladies of this board are going to put up with talk like that, you have another thing coming ! the idea that an irish man could teach a irish woman about manners!

Welcome aboard!--you'll be a fine addition to the board-- we have a grand assortment of Kiwi's and Ozzies, and enough Pom(e)s to make a pie! and we have many a transplanted son (and daughter) from that fair isle, but i think you are the first irishman, posting from ireland Rubrick did post from Trinity College, but he wasn't irish so pull up a chair, sit here, warm and cosy, close to fire, and we'll take a drop to welcome you!

Hey-- did everyone here but me know that Pom (short for Pommy) was rhyming slang? by shortening and altering pomegranate , it was used for immigrant.. at least that what M-W 10th says, as well as that it was used disparagingly by kiwi's and ozzies.