| 词组 | chairman, chairwoman, chairperson, chairlady |
| 释义 | chairman, chairwoman, chairperson, chairlady A fair amount of ink has been spilled in the discussion of the propriety and appropriateness of these terms. Usage writers who venture an opinion on the subject tend to dislike chairperson and recommend chairman, chairman or chairwoman, or chair (see chair). Chairman is the oldest of these words (1654) and the most widely used. It has been and still is used of women: • As chairman of Scholarship, Mrs. George Hervert of El Cerrito will announce the scholarship amount — Berkeley (Cal.) Daily Gazette, 31 Oct. 1973 • ... Sophie Meldrim Shonnard, honorary chairman of the benefit committee —Town & Country, March 1980 • ... the commission's chairman, Rachel Evans — Joan Cook & Judith Cummings, N.Y. Times, 21 Mar. 1980 Because chairman is used of both men and women, some commentators claim that its -man element is not masculine, buttressing their arguments with reference to the Anglo-Saxon. However, the 17th-century origin of the term vitiates the Anglo-Saxon argument, and the fact that chairwoman appeared as early as 1699 suggests that chairman was not entirely gender-neutral even in the 17th century. But there is ample precedent for using chairman of both men and women. Chairwoman is an entirely respectable word dating from 1699, but it seems not to have been used as often as it might, probably because it has long competed with chairman in application to women and has recently had competition from chairperson. Chairperson is a recent coinage (1971) as a gender-neutral term to be used in place of chairman and chairwoman, one of several such gender-neutral coinages containing -person (see person 2). It was greeted with much resistance by usage writers and others resistant to neologism, but seems to have quickly gained acceptance in a wide variety of publications. A number of commentators have noted that although chairperson was intended to be gender-neutral, it is chiefly used of vacant posts (in advertisements) and of women; apparently when men fill such vacancies, they style themselves chairmen. Our evidence shows this to be generally true even now, although our most recent evidence shows a greater percentage of men designated chairperson than our earlier evidence did. Thus chairperson tends to be truly neutral when the position is vacant or when no name is associated with the office. But when a name is mentioned, chairperson is still more likely to stand for a woman than for a man. In spite of the attacks of usage writers and others, chairperson has won fairly wide acceptance. A sample of citations from the early 1980s shows it to be used in Business Week, Science, People, College English, TV Guide, US, Inc., Publishers Weekly, and Saturday Review, as well as in a wide variety of more specialized publications. In recent use it appears to be almost as frequent as chairman. Harper 1985 and Reader's Digest 1983 suggest using chair in place of chairperson. Our evidence, however, shows chair is not nearly as commonly used as chairperson. Clearly all three of these words (or four, if you count chair) are in standard use, and you can use whichever you like best. A curious term that is not really a contender for favor here is chairlady. This is an infrequent alternative to chairwoman that we have found once or twice in British use, but mostly in American. Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish (1968) associates the term with American Jewish culture, and we have a little evidence supporting his observation. But our evidence also suggests that at one time chairlady might have been best established in labor-union usage: • This is when we had the union. I was the chairlady —Evelvn Finn, quoted in Studs Terkel, Hard Times, 1970 • ... she's union chairlady in her section —Richard Bisseil, TA Cents, 1953 We have no current evidence of such use. It has perhaps been supplanted by chairperson: • Teresa works in a textile factory and, as her union's chairperson ... —Judith Crist, Saturday Rev., August 1980 We have scattered evidence for chairlady through the 1970s, but none since. It is not a serious contender with chairman, chairwoman, and chairperson. |
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