Accidental neologism

[cos]

Alice was telling a story about some other people and at one point fumbled between saying "master" and "ma'am" in reference to one of the characters in the story, and what came out sounded like "mas'm" or "massem". I think this could be an excellent word for a gender neutral or genderqueer parallel to "master" and "ma'am"!

Comments

[sapience.livejournal.com]

Sounds way too much like "massa" to me.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was my first though. Made me cringe.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Same here.

[tshuma]

Thirded.

[wendolen.livejournal.com]

One thing I like a lot in the Dragon Age video game series is that they use the word "messere" (stress on the second syllable) as a gender-neutral form of that address, which avoids the unfortunate "massa" analogue. Of course, people aren't going to go around adopting video game neologisms, but it's still pretty cool. :)

(They also call everyone "serah" in the context where a man would be called sir in the modern day, and knights of both genders are Ser Whoever. I like that too.)