As far as the acting industry. As I said before, the use of actor/actress is a personal choice, but to learn the correct usage of the terms all we have to do is watch any one of the award shows the industry has – like the Oscars for example. “And the award for best actress goes to ….” http://www.oscar.com/nominees/?pn=nominees

I understand that other languages, such as the romance languages of french and italian do indeed have gender specific versions of their words (and equally have a few oddities that do not). I also realise that their are words in the English language too that do have a gender suffix such as the debated actor/actress and your examples of host/hostess, and so should not have gone in that direction for the point I was originally making.

Instead I should have mentioned the political correctness angle, which although I feel goes to rediculous lengths these days, is still important, especially for professionalism in either speech or in the writing form. Job titles or roles that give title to a person is one area that is focussed on specifically for gender discrimination and so political correctness of the masses has to be considered when describing ones gender.

Actor/actress is one such area that has been addressed by its own industry with the general consensus to use the word actor for either male or female is common place. The same probably should or eventually may, filter down for other such roles/jobs like host/hostess or steward/stewardess.

I suppose that grammatically the word actress could be used but semantically, I feel it would be better to use the term actor, but that’s me just pandering to actors themselves and the whole political correctness idea of modern times.

Anyway, sorry for going off topic.

In languages, other than English and its gender neutral counterparts, words have a gender. In English we use He/She/It to apply gender to the gender neutral words of the language – i.e. gender prefix. Yet, there are still words that exist in the English language with a different pronunciations and spelling for each gender of the same object/person – i.e. gender suffix. Example actor – actress; host – hostess; steward – stewardess. Personal preference applies to the use of these words when speaking, that does not mean the same applies to writing, especially in professional publications. But one would argue if that applies when it come to CrunchGear.com :)

Oh wait…

aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Resident what???

She’s a Playboy freakin hottie, for crying out loud!!!!!

I mean you wouldn’t say lawyeress, teacheress, doctoress, politicianess or any countless other thing like that, so actress is a big fail nowadays.

In the gaming world it is called – marketing to a male dominated industry!

I would think that it should be.

I’m not complaining, I’m just curious how that works.