I pass the time when I am walking around or taking a break in the archive having fictional conversations in Italian with people I’ve met here (among other things). Often I’ll try to imagine how a conversation will go when I try to buy something or mail something or do something else here so I’m ready for anything. I was having one of these imaginary conversations with an imaginary member of the archive staff and I remembered as I did so that Italian has gendered nouns for a number of professions, professors and lawyers being two, I think. If I were to practice law here in Italy, I would be an ‘avvocato’ but Dirteens is currently an ‘avocatessa.’

This got me thinking – shouldn’t we be thinking about bringing this back in English more? I was trying to imagine what a good word for ‘lady lawyer’ would be, probably because I’m married to onw, and the first thing I thought of was the most direct: ‘lawyeress.’ But since that lacked a certain, well, something, I continued thinking and instead hit on a term with a better (if illegitimate) Latin pedigree: the ‘lawyatrix.’ To give the gents a fair shake, though, why let them keep the same name? Instead, from here on out they’ll be the lawyatrix and lawyator to me. As an added bonus, lawyator sounds like it could either be a dinosaur or the name of one of the Transformers I used to play with, or both.