Life /
Any "wet" plans for Śmigus-dyngus? [51]
"Poless" exists in the Oxford dictionary
oed.com/dictionary/poless_n?tl=true&tab=factsheet
But it fell out of whatever usage it had by 1930
Problems for English speakers:
Stress.... where is it? Oxford gives three possible pronunciations (2 British 1 American) and none sound right... stressing -ess just sounds dumb and the unstressed pronunciation makes the word sound kind of ugly.
It's not listed at all in American Heritage (the best dictionary of American usage).
On the other hand the suffix -ess is listed and the dictionary says (among other things):
"the feminine suffix -ess is sometimes considered sexist and demeaning because it gratuitously calls attention to gender"
"the feminine form may be taken to imply that the task somehow differs when performed by a woman, or that it is by default the realm of men.
"A few specialized examples persist in fields in which the sex of the referent is relevant, sometimes for historical reasons, including chiefess in anthropology, goddess in history and literature, and lioness in biology. Other cases, like webmistress, represent arch reclaimings of the -ess suffix, but these are whimsical or ironic exceptions"
Interestingly there's no mention of using -ess with nouns referring to ethnicity and the only two examples I could think of, namely Jewess and Negress are listed as "offensive"
Poless is a non-starter and doesn't add anything that Pole or Polish woman (the trend in English is to dispense with nouns referring to ethnicities in favor of adjectives, sometimes before people, woman or man.
"Penelope Cruz is Spanish." or "Penelope Cruz is a Spanish woman." sound much better than "Penelope Cruz is a Spaniard." or god help us all "Penelope Cruz is a Spaniardess."
(yes Spaniardess is also listed in Oxfored - it sounds dreadful).
