'A female employee in charge of a shop is the manager. Would a female airplane pilot be the pilotess?'

Slight drift here, perhaps — but it was one of you-guys over there who laughed at our usage of 'manageress'. Don't know about 'pilotess'; but one of our more obsessively PC newspapers, The Guardian [for whom I was a regional theatre critic for quarter-cntry but no longer] is now insisting, for avowedly PC reasons, on calling all performers in plays 'actors'; which strikes me as absurd as 'actress' is a valuably specific word, which I know that even you smartarses over there use; so an important and helpful distinction is being lost. Bet even you, Artbrooks, wouldn't call eg Bette Davies or Marilyn Monroe or whoever an 'actor'; but the idiots on The Guardian would.