Authoress

With regard to the use of this and certain other words of like formation, Mr. Gould, in his "Good English," says: " Poet means simply a person who writes poetry; and author , in the sense under consideration, a person who writes poetry or prose—not a man who writes, but a person who writes. Nothing in either word indicates sex; and everybody knows that the functions of both poets and authors are common to both sexes. Hence, authore and poete are superfluous. And they are superfluous, also, in another respect—that they are very rarely used, indeed they hardly can be used, independently of the name of the writer, as Mrs., or Mi , or a female Christian name. They are, besides, philological absurdities, because they are fabricated on the false a umption that their primaries indicate men . They are, moreover, liable to the charge of affectation and prettine , to say nothing of pedantic pretension to accuracy. "If the e is to be permitted, there is no reason for excluding it from any noun that indicates a person; and the next editions of our dictionaries may be made complete by the addition of writre , officer e , managere , superintendent e , secretary e , treasurer e , walker e , talkere , and so on to the end of the vocabulary."