The Volokh Conspiracy

Yes it's funny, but he may be right! My dictionary, webster.com, defines protege as "one who is protected or trained or whose career is furthered by a person of experience, prominence, or influence". Sounds like someone with a mentor to me, especially in the "or trained" case.

And I've frequently heard people use "mentor-protege" together in this sense. Google gives 871,000 hits for "mentor protege" together, but only 785,000 for "mentor mentee". So it seems to me that mentor-protege IS found in some dictionaries, and it is at least equal to mentor-mentee in a descriptivist sense.

Perhaps we should cast about for words phonetically similar to mentee and consider appending a new definition rather than protege. Maybe manatee. Or Maccabee.

AnonVCfan: it's rare for a comment to make me crack up, so congratulations. That was smurfin' hilarious!!!

I still don't understand why a prescriptivist can't argue that a new coinage that has broad but not universal acceptance and appears in some but not all dictionaries "is not a word." The point is that a significant number of English speakers still do not accept it as a word. This is distinct from arguing that a universally accepted word should not have been acccepted. In such cases a prescriptive will admit that the "battle is lost" like IB Bill above.

I am also in the camp of the one who suggested modifying the definition of "protege" to fit - English is already filled with words that are ambiguous in meaning, or carry different connotations to different listeners. Ask 100 people to define, in their own words and as precisely as possible, the words "smart" and "intelligent", and I venture to guess that a majority (myself included) would define the two differently, and there would be a number of subtle but meaningful differences between how different folks understand these words. So, English has never been terribly precise (as if any language is!); what's the point -- we're not using the language to build a high tech machine with ultra-fine tolerances, we're trying to communicate ideas between beings with different (and sometimes incompatible) thought processes. As to the word "mentee", I, too, find it a little grating and very pretentious. I'm just fine with using the word "protege" to mean one who has been trained or advised by a mentor. And if you, as a listener, find my use of that word in place of "mentee" imprecise or misleading, I can live with that as the price of any imperfect form of communication like language.

Thanks, Adeez

Dictionaries serve two principal purposes, which require somewhat different criteria. One is to give you an appropriate word to say what you want to say; the other is to give you what may be meant by a word others use. For the second purpose, it’s useful for a dictionary to include any meaning one is likely to encounter; the size of the dictionary may determine how common a use must be before it is recorded, but for this purpose it makes no difference whether a particular meaning is (to the majority, or to the cultivated) wrong, or just rare. If you run across a word used with some meaning, right, wrong, or just unusual, it is useful to know what that meaning is. To restrict a dictionary to meanings “universally accepted,” or even to those accepted by a majority of language users, would deprive it of much of its value.

A dictionary can describe meanings found in use, and, for the benefit of those trying to choose a word, add a usage note to say that a particular meaning is rare, or found only in certain contexts, or slang, or considered uncultured, or something of the kind. The dictionary I have in my office, Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate, does a lot of this; see the entries for “comprise” and “infer,” where these issues often arise. (Some consider Webster’s attitude towards usage to be too relaxed, but it generally identifies issues, and the basic approach is sound.)

By the way, a dictionary writer isn’t “disqualified from participating in the whole usage ecology” (I’m setting aside the question of whether this is a standard use of “ecology,” since I think the thought is clear); but authority is not individual here, for either descriptive or prescriptive purposes. Prescriptive judgments are based on usage too, though the usage of some subgroup of language users. Nobody gets to set usage by fiat, even (for example) Fowler; a writer may make a proposal, but it doesn’t set a standard until it’s accepted as a standard.

If a mentor directs a mentee, who guides a protégé?

KParker: I was thinking in terms of the following:

"We need to be proactive here."

"We need to take initiative here."

Or "You need to be more proactive."

"You need to take more initiative."

FWIW, "proactive" doesn't seem as offensive to the ear anymore. You sorta get used to it. My objection is was this: It pretended to be a new concept, but it really wasn't.

I'm not sure I'm a prescriptivist. We don't have an Academie Anglais, after all. Or at least that's what I tell all my mentees :)

Golem, I think that would 'patron'.

Most people would probably identify the recipient of mentoring as a 'protege'. If anything, we've truncated the meaning of 'patron' to a person who provides financial support, possibly because 'patron' is a synonym for 'customer'. 'Mentor' has become the word used to describe someone who champions a subordinate's career in ways that aren't exclusively financial. In the process the need for 'mentee' to distinguish the kind of support that is being received has been lost.

I have to disagree with Eugene somewhat. I think we're on our way to making the 'non-financial supporter' meaning of patron archaic. It's only the prescriptivist bent of most dictionary writers that keeps them from recognizing the changing meaning of the words.