What do you call a retired professor? Sounds like the start of a joke, but TIL that professor emeritus, which I recently became, technically means ‘honorably discharged prof.' At least that's what it means in Latin, someone who served and is now done. But it's not the merit part that I want to write about, it's the suffix.
Emeritus is a Latin masculine singular. You can tell by the -us suffix. Emerita, ending in the feminine singular -a, designates a woman who is a retired professor. Emerita is attested in English as early as the 1840s and remains current in the academy.
The English plural, emeriti, is based on the Latin masculine plural suffix -i, and emeritae uses the feminine plural ending to denote a group of retired women professors—just as alumnus and alumna, and alumni and alumnae, designate singular and plural male and female grads, respectively. Or just alum, alums, to be inclusive.
But when referring to retired men and women instructors together they are still too-often grouped under the masculine plural emeriti. My (former) department has an emeriti office and an emeriti email listserv (I have yet to receive a message on that listserv). Emeriti in this gender-neutral sense is a throwback to the outmoded grammatical doctrine of the worthiness of the genders: that the masculine (in Latin) is more worthy than the feminine, and the feminine more worthy than the neuter. The worthiness rule applied to English says, use the masculine pronoun when a group is mixed, or gender is uncertain or irrelevant.
It's always dangerous to apply Latin rules to English. And given that generic he is now stake-through-the-heart dead; and given that the academy is trying to be at the forefront of gender inclusivity and is heavily invested in honoring pronoun choice; and given that most academics today have little Latin and less Greek, how’s about ditching that out-of-date generic masculine emeriti?
What should we say instead? We could invent emeritx, on the analogy of Latinx and Mx, though, like these forms, which are increasing in popularity, the pronunciation of something ending in x may not be self-evident.
There's another option--the Englished adjective emerit. Emerit was actually once a word. It's labeled obsolete and rare by the OED, and not attested since the early 18th century. Plus, when it was used, it was used as an insult, not an honor. But emerit has the advantage of being gender-neutral and nonbinary, and not dependent on a knowledge of Latin suffixes.
Perhaps it's time to dust off emerit, which could serve as well for retired adjuncts, too often ignored by employers who profit from their cheap labor. After years of struggle for appropriate professional recognition, many of them are also eligible for honorable retirement.
But emerit is truly a bizarro word, so in the absence of a suitable existing word, or a suitable invented word, maybe just call us all honorably discharged, because at least that's Modern English for someone who’s been through the wars. Or if we can't have a word, maybe we could have our own emoji. 🎓
