Mentee, Mentoree, Meant what?
A friend of mine recently disparagingly commented on a mentoring program for their use of the word “mentee”.
To quote: “You’d think a mentoring program would know there’s no such word.”
For those of you thinking I’m being needlessly fastidious and that I’m going to say the word should be mentoree, you’d be wrong, as mentoree is not a word either.
Say what?
It’s true. Both of these constructs reflect the same kind of grammatical over extension toddlers make when they say things like swammed or runned.
It’s as if people have searched through their recollections of word forms and dragged out good old:
- addressor/addressee
- departor/departee
- abductor/abductee
and applied it to mentor.
Well, what’s wrong with that?
This form of language is controlled by the meaning of the verb at the heart of the matter.
The or ending words is the doer, and the ee ending word has the action done too them, but this is predicated upon there being an original verb there in the first instance:
- to address
- to depart
- to abduct
Let me make this clear. In no way is there a verb to ment something. Meaning that we could have a mentor as one who ments, and a mentee as one who is mented.
The verb form of mentor is, unfortunately, to mentor.
Why is this?
Mentor isn’t a construct like addressor or adbuctor, instead it comes from Greek mythology. Mentor was Odysseus’s trusted counsellor. Indeed Odysseus made Mentor guardian to his son Telemachus, when Odysseus set of to fight the Trojan War. It’s a really cool story. Look it up.
So, what to do?
- Mentor and Student
- Mentor and Young Artist
- Mentor and Aspiring Teacher
Mentor and Telemachus.
July 21st, 2011 at 2:31 pm
Yet the word “mentee” is a legitimate English word which you can find in the Webster dictionary and the word “mentoree” is not.
July 21st, 2011 at 10:06 pm
Yes quite right. I did say ridicule was permitted
September 3rd, 2011 at 1:55 am
Heh; got here trying to figure out what to call the Telemachii in our program–something besides “emerging scholars”, but “mentee” is so clearly incorrect… I think that you’re right about all this, but I think we’ll end up going with mentee anyway. Ah well.
September 5th, 2011 at 7:09 pm
You know, English is full of examples of exceptions to the rule – my guess is that mentee is here to stay – yet another exception. Sigh.
April 19th, 2012 at 2:02 am
In my day, it was simply ‘mentor’ (or even ‘master’) and ‘protege’ … ‘master’ of course is now socially unacceptable.
April 21st, 2012 at 5:26 pm
Oh, protege, of course – I think I have a new favourite