Cuckold

Spinster matches bachelor although the usage of it differs somewhat. Bachelor still has some positive connotations whereas I am struggling to think of a time that where spinster had a positive spin.

I used to work in a capacity where I saw a lot of marriage and death certificates. It was always interesting looking at them because they covered a large period of time - approx 1900 to the early 90s. What I never realised was that Spinster and Bachelor were used in two ways on the certificates - as both occupation and marital status. While it was far more common for spinster to be written twice -as compared to bachelor - we used to find it interesting trying to work out what a bachelor was when it came to employment. General consensus was someone unemployed but supported by their family or other independant means. Probably completely incorrect but that was what we thought.

I suppose now with computer templates and specific fields and drop down menus there's less chance of ambiguous little descriptions and 'free text' being included in that kind of thing. Pity really.

Now I have found the word cuckoldess

What do you call this kind of word which has obviously been derived from a previously "shouldn't have been derived from" word?

Many thanks'

"Guy". Perhaps it doesn't exactly fit in the way OP contemplated, but I think it belongs here. Let me explain:

"Guy" is a versatile word. It can be applied to males of almost any age. I'm not sure it can be used for young children (except as "little guy"), but male teenagers and old men can both be referred to informally as "guy". With female humans, you always have to choose between "woman" and "girl".

I find myself unconsciously using "girl" for every woman up to a few years older than I am and "woman" for everyone older than that, but since that has pushed the girl/woman barrier well into the thirties now, I'm fearing that pretty soon I should stop doing that, or maybe I should have already. A female equivalent of "guy" would be very useful.

Agreed. Good example.

#22 -- That came up (in my mind and conversation, if nowhere else) in the 1970s, during the first flowering of second-wave feminism.

"Girl" became more or less taboo. Almost all females became women in all contexts (so that in US newspapers you'll see references to women of middle-school age).

The argument was that it was demeaning to call an adult male "boy" (as adult black males had been called in the south) so it was equally demeaning to call adult females "girl".

I argued that there were three pairs:

woman-man
guy-girl
boy-girl

And that it was a question of register. Informally we say guy and girl.

There is a word "gal" which in some dialects is the feminine of "guy" but "gal" was never part of my active vocabulary or that of anyone in my circle.

Another effect of this was that we no longer speak of our boys in Iraq or Afghanistan, as we spoke of our boys in Vietnam or Europe or the Pacific. You have to include both genders now, appropriately, and you can't say "our boys and girls" because of the taboo against "girl". So it has become "our men and women."

I have not read all the answers but this is a common issue in Argentina with a woman as President. Do we call it PresidentE or PresidentA? that is the question... most people use both in the same conversation as it goes out of their mouth..
Seems in Spanish PresidentA does not exist and the charge is PresidentE. So calling a woman by a masculine name sounds wierd.

itsa, #25, doesn't the use of the masculine or feminine article, "el" or "la" solve the problem of the "genderless" nouns in Spanish?

I know that I'm still just at novice at Spanish, but I've always thought that was a particularly graceful way of indicating the gender of the person being spoken or written about.

It solves half problem then there is the "noun" problem, whether you make it f or m. Spanish has that peculiarity which English has not got, almost all nouns have gender.
The say La PresidentE when they want to sound too scholastic and La PresidentA if they are popular.

Itsa, #27, Now I see what you meant. Much the same as "jefe" where some folks say "la jefe" (which is probably correct) and others say "la jefa" (which shouldn't be correct). Again, as a novice Spanish speaker, I was always taught that you should only change the article for a gender change unless the noun ended in "o", then you changed both the article and the final letter (o >> a) for a gender change from masculine to feminine, although it wasn't necessarily wrong to add an "a" to nouns ending in a consonant.

I have to laugh though at this wikipedia entry; "cornuto" is a light-hearted and inoffensive word...

Here in Sicily, calling someone 'cornuto' is a mortal insult that demands a violent response (with exceptions of course) in a way that it's hard to describe - English just doesn't have these kinds of words anymore.