Mrs Mary Clancy from Portmarnock asks: "Should I, or should I not, use author and poet when I want to refer to females who write?"
I have noticed that the suffix-ess in poetess, authoress and actress is used less and less in print these days, both in the newspapers and in the literary reviews. Anthony Burgess noted that those responsible for this business still found princess, duchess and countess perfectly acceptable; even mistress they had no desire to tamper with. Nor, he said, were they averse to clicking their fingers to get the attention of a humble waitress. I am informed that in one American university it is now considered offensive to women to refer to a Greek goddess.
It's a matter of choice for the moment, Mrs Clancy. But poet-ess and authoress seem to have had their day. Custom is the sole arbiter of verbal propriety, as Horace said; and a very capricious power it can be. The -ess is from French-esse, used to denote a female person or animal, from Late Latin-issa, from the Greek-issa.
I'm glad to see those words ending in -ette falling into disuse. Usherette is one. It wasn't coined until around 1925. Usher is related to os, the Latin for mouth, and ostium, the mouth of a house, otherwise the door. From ostium came ostarius, a doorkeeper. In Old French it was shortened to hussier, which gave English usher.
A lady from Thurles wants to know the origin of fool in gooseberry fool. Is it related to the other fool, a silly person, she asks?
It seems to be, and suggested by the synom trifle, mentioned by John Florio in his Italian-English dictionary of 1598: "Mantaglia -a kinde of clouted creame called a foole or a trifle in English". Fool is as interesting as it is old. Flo is the Latin for "I blow", and it comes from follis, a bellows. Follis found its way into many languages in the sense, originally, of a man who talks a lot of air. The noun folly is a little closer to the original Latin. Silly is ancient, too, and has changed a great deal over the centuries. First came the Gothic sels, good, and after that Old English saele, happiness. The adjective seely, ancestor of silly, came to mean favoured by heaven, afterwards holy, then harmless, then simple, then simple-minded. All, of course, related to the modern German selig, blessed.