Mentee or Mentoree?

In the epics of Homer from Greek mythology, Odysseus was away from home for 20 years. Before leaving he left his infant son, Telemachus, under the guardianship of his friend, Mentor. Yes, Mentor was his name.

Now Athene, the Greek goddess of wisdom, and Odysseus were part of a mutual admiration club. During his absence, she got into the body of Mentor, and taught, guided, advised, mentored, & counselled Telemachus.  A few 100 years ago, the term ‘mentor’ was 1^st used to refer to a guide or counsellor.

Some time later, maybe a century, the word was ‘verbed’ (in Calvinspeak) or verbalized. In the (v.) form it came to mean ‘guide’ or ‘counsel’.

Now comes all the other dis-figurations of the name of Odysseus’ friend. If a guide is called a mentor, what do you call the person being guided?

The term mentee seems to have entered some dictionaries. It seems to have come out of the erroneous assumption that ‘mentor’ is a noun form of the word ‘ment’. So you have the verb employ, giving rise to the nouns employer & employee, referring to one who employs & one who is employed respectively. Similarly ‘ment’ gives mentor & mentee.

But what if the root verb is not ment, but mentor? Would the person who is being acted upon then be called a ‘mentoree’? Thankfully that word doesn't seem to have entered the dictionaries. Yet.

And then later maybe the person ‘mentor’ing would be called a mentorer? Have sometimes seen people get confused when the noun and verb are spelled the same. As in sponsor. Have heard the word ‘sponsorer’ used a few times.  Am curious now – what would they call the person being sponsored? Sponsee? Sponsoree?

Coming back to mentor & ___. Why not just use existing words? You could have disciple or student. Either is better than mentee (Brings connotations of someone on the mend after a stint in prison).

I’d prefer protégé (Add an e for the feminine form). 

Indian colonization of English

Once upon a long ago, the English colonized India. With our frequent hartals, strikes & fasts-to-death, they finally got fed up and left.

But we weren't done with them yet. We have been working surreptitiously to take-over their language. With assistance from many other fellow ex-colonies. While the Americans set about ruining the spellings, the Indians worked on new meanings and extensions. And we're not satisfied with just adding new words such as Hartal, Satyagraha, Padayatra etc. We want to twist around original words as well. Hopefully the rest of the world will soon join us.

Some eg:

Revert: Not established yet inspite of frequent use, but will in the near future mean 'To respond or reply to.'
Prepone: Clearly a more logical antonym than 'advance'.
Thrice: If you can have twice, then why say 'three times'?
And Triple is more cogent than 'treble'. You already have triplets and triple jump anyway. And it's easier to 'triplicate' something than reproducing threefold. Soon we'll start working on Fourple. The 'e' at the end to be pronounced as 'ay'. Quadruple is too difficult to spell.

In the pipeline, some other terms we plan to introduce to the RotW.
Wheatish complexion for the Northies, and Ricish (Brown variety) for the Southies.
Victims of Eve teasing still face a lot of tension in their efforts to get some redressal of the same.
Passing out would not require the services of an allopath.
Even Tolkien uses sister-sons, so why not cousin brothers?
BHK will be a standard in all accomodation classifieds.

Now, am off to read some non-veg jokes that a batchmate forwarded. Meanwhile entertain yourself referring to these dictionaries. Or this blog