Oh well, it can't be helped, returned Teal. We'll get him yet. By the way, walk down to the lecture with me this afternoon?

Equally unnecessary is marking the presence of women by the suffix ‘ess’, which not only sounds like a diminutive (the ‘little woman’) but also gives the impression that women in these positions are anomalies that need to be singled out: sculptress, poetess, prophetess, priestess, even Ruth the Moabitess. And if one should ever find it necessary to use the plural, the result is quite a mouthful: poetesses, prophetesses, Moabitesses, etc. I have heard on the BBC in the last year the forms ‘auctioneeress’, ‘manageress’, and even ‘lecturess’. Scholaresses beware.]

The public […] said that Miss Bogardus was a suffragist because she had never caught a man; that she wanted something, but it wasn't the vote.

But no Homer man ever yet got rich quick breeding homers.