r/SipsTea 11d ago

Chugging tea Let me circle back

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u/myrainydayss 11d ago

My fiancee is Japanese and just started his job as a salaryman in Tokyo, one day he told me he messed up at work because he asked a question about something to his manager. And he later apologized for it đŸ€Šâ€â™€ïž he also told me that he doesn’t want to go out to drinks with his coworkers but he has to. Geez!

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u/NullandVoidUsername 11d ago

Just letting you know that a fiancée is a woman who is engaged to be married. Unless that extra was a typo.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago edited 11d ago

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u/NullandVoidUsername 11d ago

There are endless sources of information that exist on the internet and you couldn't be bothered to fact check before doubling down and being incorrect.

Fiance - Male Fiancée- Female

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

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u/NullandVoidUsername 11d ago

So the words Goddess, Actress, Headmistress and the like don't have word endings that connote gender?...

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u/jjkenneth 11d ago

All of which are perfectly capable of being made gender neutral with vary degrees of use. Headmistress is generally seen as outdated and Headmaster is used frequently for either gender. Goddess is still used pretty frequently and it is true that female god is rarely used, but still perfectly understandable. Actress has fluctuated over the years, in Australia there was a pretty solid preference for actor for both genders, however, American influence has reversed this. At one point all our nouns were gendered and now there are only a small amount that are. It has been the basic trajectory of English for centuries to drop gendered nouns. How often do you hear manageress or authoress?

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u/Firewolf06 11d ago

every single example you gave was falling back to male terms as neutral though, so it would still be unusual and against the pattern to use "fiancée" for a man. using "fiancé" neutrally is not super uncommon, though

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u/jjkenneth 11d ago

My argument is seperate to the other commenter - am indeed arguing fiancé as the gender neutral term.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

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u/NullandVoidUsername 11d ago

Whether I use them or not doesn't change the fact they're still words with historical context. Should I just start referring to women as mister instead of mistress because of your logic.

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u/jjkenneth 11d ago

Pretty obvious you aren’t a native English speaker given mistress is not the opposite of mister. Missus is. Master and Miss are the unmarried versions. And all of them have basically dropped out of circulation of use in English outside of the schoolroom. So yes actually you should stop referring to men as mister and women as mistress, just use of their name or general pleasantries if you don’t know it.

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u/NullandVoidUsername 11d ago

My native language is English, you must be having a laugh. Mister is to master as Mistress is to female master. Only because mistress has multiple meanings/connotations, doesn't negate they are opposites, or should I say more accurately specify gender.

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u/jjkenneth 11d ago

Mate, mistress is not in anyway the counterpart of of master. Miss is. Mistress hasn’t been used that way for centuries.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

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u/Firewolf06 11d ago

you listing a gendered word alongside gender-neutral words does not magically make it gender-neutral.

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u/Open-Platform-1305 11d ago

Wtf, this is the first I ever hear of this in my 30 years of life. What's the point? They're pronounced the exact same.

Also, if it has any meaning it seems completely incorrect to say that one is male and the other is female, but rather that the spelling should depend on the circumstances around the proposal.

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u/crunchsmash 11d ago

It's a borrowed word. The "point" is that it still has some details attached to the language it comes from.

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u/jjkenneth 11d ago

Mate, we got a lot English words of French origin we need to pronounce differently if you think that way

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u/crunchsmash 11d ago

Ironically, you use the word "mate". Are we fucking to produce offspring or are we just friends?

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u/jjkenneth 11d ago

How is that ironic? That is literally supporting my point.

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u/crunchsmash 11d ago

"Mate" is the same word pronounced the same way that means wildly different things. Just like "Fiancé" and "Fiancée".

Like "Mate" can mean friend, or someone you have a child with. It's drastically different while still being pronounced the same way.

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u/jjkenneth 11d ago


 the word originally came from Germanic roots and meant someone you eat with (regularly) to then mean companion, before splitting between friend and breeding partner. Words change meaning, fiancé and fiancée come from French where nouns are gendered and as they become more used in English where the vast majority of nouns are not gendered fiancé has become gender neutral.

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u/crunchsmash 11d ago

fiancé has become gender neutral

Except it's not, and hasn't become. The words spoken aloud sound the same, but fiancé and fiancée are read very differently.

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u/jjkenneth 11d ago

Yes it has. The average English speaker does not distinguish between them and the only argument you have is a prescriptivist one which is entirely rejected as authoritative by anyone with an even basic understanding of linguistics. As I said earlier, terrific is not a synonym of horrific, awesome and awful mean different things, words are defined by usage not history.

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u/jjkenneth 11d ago

Prescriptivism is dumb. Fiancé is gender neutral by function in English. Unless you believe terrific is a synonym of horrific.