Grammar and Hooters

http://girlandguitar.blogspot.com/2009/07/hooters-understand.html

One has to admire a Hooters Girl who appreciates good grammar. Of course, it’s difficult to decide whether it should be “Hooters’ Girl” or “Hooters Girl”. I assume that it’s officially Hooters Girl, and I’m willing to accept that as well as overlook the slightly demeaning “Girl” designation. I guess “Hooters Woman” just sounds weird.

Still, I’m glad that there are waiters (“Hooters Waiter” sounds stranger yet) at Hooters that appreciate the proper application of grammatical rules. Surely this bodes well for someone who wants to be a country star, especially if she’s a songwriter as well as a performer, although, frankly, sometimes you have to bend grammar to fit a song. I give you Midge Ure (Ultravox) “If I Was” as a prime example, a song that ignores the proper subjunctive mood but just sounds more “right” than “If I Were”. Of course it’s not a country song, unless your country is Austria.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23l2EbXDrlo

New link added – bitterwaitress.com

http://bitterwaitress.info/wp/

10 years old and proud of it!  Should be on everyone’s reading list.

And this is a good time to remind everyone that my use of the term waiter is used in a non-gender-specific way. As for bitterwaitress – “The choice to use the feminine term “waitress” stems from a tongue-in-cheek reaction to the nascent and prevailing use of the term “actor” for people in the theatre irrespective of gender”

Right on sister!

It’s funny how English only retains vestiges of gender in nouns, unlike languages like French or German, where every noun is either masculine, feminine or neuter. Obviously, since those languages don’t have just 1 “you” or “the” like we do and need gender to help tie in the case of the word as well, it’s very important to distinguish between genders in order to figure out whether the noun is a subject, direct object indirect object or the like  (we use position of the word instead – “The boy bit the dog” has a much different meaning than “The dog bit the boy”, whereas, in German, boy and dog can either be in front or at the end and you know who the subject is by how the article “the” is formed). My point is, we aren’t totally consistent with the practice of feminizing “masculine” words (or vice versa). Who ever heard of a lawyress for instance?

For more dry grammatical info on this subject, you can see a page from the arcane 1874 treatise 

An English grammar

 By Eduard Adolf Ferdinand Maetzner, Clair James Grece

at Amazon.com.

http://tinyurl.com/r5qfmh

You’ve just got to page back and read the Translator’s Preface. This book was written by a German professor in Berlin and apparently, even the translator thinks that “The German is the modern classical tongue”. He dissed French and other romance languages  as “the debris of Latin” and English as “from the debris of Romance and of a decayed and decapitated German idiom”. Now, speaking as someone whose only second language *is* German, and recognizing a lot of English-esque words in Plattdeutsch (the low “vulgar” German dialect/language spoken in Northern Germany and along the Western border) and, recognizing the rather slipshod nature of English in general (all of those strange hononyms and inconsistencies like this one), we kicked your ass in the two World Wars, Herr Professor Doktor! We don’t need 6 stinking different “the’s” to tell us whether the dog bit the boy and I’ll call you Du instead of Sie all I want to. What are you going to do, sic Frau Professor Doktor Maetzner on me?

Seriously, on this site, it’s waiter for everyone even though I use server a lot. Oh yeah, it’s always guest instead of customer. Every waiter should get in the mindset of calling them that.  I think it makes a difference in mindset that is helpful to the pocketbook.