Waitress goes to waiter now, server isn't there yet, but it ought to be for searching's sake, and might as well not add the complication of keeping the existing two separate or the incorrectness of aliasing one to the other. Think most people in those jobs tend to use the generic one anyway. I tried to use the alias suggestion form a second ago, but it said waiter was already aliased to something. That doesn't seem to be the case, though. It doesn't say it is in the wiki, and it's showing up normally on posts. Did someone coincidentally just make a change or something?

Considering that there are also images depicting computing servers under the server tag, probably not the best idea. Computing servers are what come to mind first when I see server used as a noun.

"Server" makes me think of computer and nothing else.

Wouldn't we just tag those as computer? Unless there was a sign or something, I can't imagine how you could look at a computer and know whether or not it happens to be acting as a server for whatever.

notnobody said:
Wouldn't we just tag those as computer? Unless there was a sign or something, I can't imagine how you could look at a computer and know whether or not it happens to be acting as a server for whatever.

Does this look like a typical desktop computer to you?

It sort of looks like a bunch of racks full of VCRs actually...

But I didn't say anything about desktops anyway. Server is a role, not an object. I have more than one server at my house, and they're all just regular computers doing server tasks. My media server is just a tower in a closet. Are you saying server should be just taken to mean rackmount computer? In the list of posts for the tag right now, there're three waitstaff like I was thinking, three like you linked, one weird bandwidth chart that seems strange and out of place, and two otherwise normal looking tower computers, one of which actually says the word server on it and the other with a response code**. I'd say that's good grounds for a disambiguation. It's obviously true that server can be a thing that implies computer sometimes. Also true that female servers aren't waiters, though, and vice versa. But they all are servers.

**Edit: And one weird old timey arcade game looking tape drive something that sort of looks like a computer but I don't really have a clue what it's supposed to be..

I would rather waiter and waitress because they are the iconic names for the people who sit you down, assist with your menu, serve you food and drink, and then usually hands you your payment method.

The usage of server, as I recently experienced, is gender neutral because you do not know if it's waiter or waitress until you are assigned one, to which they will then serve you, along with others they are assigned to, until you leave. You do not call for an additional server unless you need assistance, because you already have one. Ergo, you can call them waiter/waitress, or by gender terms or even by name if they provide you one.

The usage of server for computers or etc. is a bit less ambiguous. It is either a machine / set of machines, dedicated to host anything from sites to applications, personal or private, but all online; or it is also known as the actual applications you use, I.E. Minecraft servers or Hamachi servers.

Instead of aliasing them to server, I would rather common languages aliased to waiter/waitress.

My server is offended #ServerLivesMatter

But really though, when someone says server these days they think the computer type, Especially on the internet. Hell when I was just a bab, when they said "a server will be with you shortly" I laughed internally because I always though of the computer type first.
Server can be disambiguated if absolutely necessary and we have server_(computer) and server_(occupation) but I feel that may be unnecessary.

This isn't about getting offended. It's about being accurate. I don't know why everybody's on such a hair trigger every time anything vaguely related to gonads comes up. This just came to mind earlier when I saw waiter on a picture of some female with her skirt up and I thought "who tagged waiter on here instead of waitress?...Oh, it's aliased? That's freaking weird, and wrong; She's a chick. I should suggest just using the generic one everybody always uses in real life to begin with." It's just unnecessary work to remove the wrongness by keeping both, when there's a totally common term we could alias to that doesn't mislead.

The disambiguation makes sense just because they're the same word, but I still say it doesn't make a lot of sense to almost ever actually tag a computer as a server, because, although I get what you mean with the mental image, it's just not accurate. A server is a role. When you host a Minecraft game? Your machine just became a server. Go look at like Dell or something, and check out the server section. You'll see rackmount ones that look like your mental image, and then tower ones that look like every typical workstation machine, and blade ones, some of which barely even look like computers at all, alongside other devices that aren't computers at all but definitely look like them, like storage nodes and switches and stuff.

Computers already have computer as a tag. Except for instances where there're clues, you can't necessarily say one is a server. If anything, the five items it's already tagged on already probably constitute an overuse.

notnobody said:
I don't know why everybody's on such a hair trigger every time anything vaguely related to gonads comes up.

You're the only one typing out paragraphs here simply because you cannot comprehend a post with a female in it getting tagged with waiter.

Never heard of women being referred to as waiters? What kind of backwater sexist place do you live in? Waiters, stewards, etc are actually unisex titles.

Furrin_Gok said:
Never heard of women being referred to as waiters? What kind of backwater sexist place do you live in? Waiters, stewards, etc are actually unisex titles.

In my defense, both my grandma and my brother's fiancé refer(red) to themselves as waitresses. Family influence on my side... I always say "Ma'am" or "Sir", even if they are young.

Furrin_Gok said:
Never heard of women being referred to as waiters? What kind of backwater sexist place do you live in? Waiters, stewards, etc are actually unisex titles.

So is policeman, fireman, postman, etc.

-1 to alias. Server can refer to several things.

-1 for the alias

-1
Waiters generally dislike being called servers, because of the 'servant' connotations. In any case, it's certainly not common enough usage to alias.

Fun fact: Over 120 years ago, the word "boy" meant servant.

BlueDingo said:
Fun fact: Over 120 years ago, the word "boy" meant servant.

That's it!
https://youtu.be/7OWMB3ewpNM?t=90

I don't know what weird world you few live in. All of the servers I know prefer that term, and all of those other job titles definitely are not unisex, which is why they've been replaced with generic ones. Firefighter, police officer, mail carrier, flight attendant... I don't have any problem with gendered germanic words. I just think if we're going to use them we should do it right.

notnobody said:
That's it!
https://youtu.be/7OWMB3ewpNM?t=90

I don't know what weird world you few live in. All of the servers I know prefer that term, and all of those other job titles definitely are not unisex, which is why they've been replaced with generic ones. Firefighter, police officer, mail carrier, flight attendant... I don't have any problem with gendered germanic words. I just think if we're going to use them we should do it right.

Well, where do you live? I'll tell you mine, if you tell me yours? Or, without the joke, that is a cultural difference, and if that is your only reason then chances are, it is not going to be changed.

notnobody said:
That's it!
https://youtu.be/7OWMB3ewpNM?t=90

I don't know what weird world you few live in. All of the servers I know prefer that term, and all of those other job titles definitely are not unisex, which is why they've been replaced with generic ones. Firefighter, police officer, mail carrier, flight attendant... I don't have any problem with gendered germanic words. I just think if we're going to use them we should do it right.

No, they were replaced because people kept claiming they were and refused to stop complaining about it until they changed. A female postman is still a postman. That term existed before the current definition of "man" did and doesn't suddenly become a gendered term just because the word that makes the second half of it did. Some of these older terms still exist today, such as female ballboys at tennis matches.

The term waiter applies to all waiters, not just the male ones, just like actor applies to all actors and nurse applies to all nurses. Prince/princess is the only exception I can think of.

What are you going to do next, complain about the word "blonde" being used on male characters?

notnobody said:
That's it!
https://youtu.be/7OWMB3ewpNM?t=90

I don't know what weird world you few live in. All of the servers I know prefer that term, and all of those other job titles definitely are not unisex, which is why they've been replaced with generic ones. Firefighter, police officer, mail carrier, flight attendant... I don't have any problem with gendered germanic words. I just think if we're going to use them we should do it right.

All waitstaff I know use waiter/waitress. I live in the northern midwest. :|

BlueDingo said:
What are you going to do next, complain about the word "blonde" being used on male characters?

It's funny: all gender terms are female terms when describing blonde in my iPhone dictionary. But I, a male, have been called blonde by adults for all of my life! I mean, is that a real distinction, because my parents, both female, never made one.

Siral_Exan said:
It's funny: all gender terms are female terms when describing blonde in my iPhone dictionary. But I, a male, have been called blonde by adults for all of my life! I mean, is that a real distinction, because my parents, both female, never made one.

I think it's because the male/female distinction between blond/blonde only exists in french. Same thing with brunet/brunette. Why the english language went with the longer female ones instead of the shorter male ones, I don't know.

Blue, that's a weird example to give. Remember that actress was the going term until super recently. It's still not total coverage for people saying actor for women too. We didn't get those terms from some strange brand of sexism. We got them from German language roots, where pretty much every profession has a male and female word for it. But I think I've heard they're sort of slowly doing the same thing as us and generalizing them. I still don't see where these weird thinly veiled charges of PC complaint are coming from.

I'm in the northeastern US, and maybe we do have some cultural differences that make server more common, or maybe it's just the people I know specifically. I do hear plenty of people say waiter/waitress, myself included. It's mostly the people who actually do the job I ever hear correcting anyone. I sort of just assumed it sounded more professional to them or something. But I can tell you I sure as heck have never been anywhere where anyone says waitress about a man or waiter about a woman. When someone uses the gender-specific terms, they use the right ones. We don't here, though. We use waiter for everyone, apparently.

notnobody said:
When someone uses the gender-specific terms, they use the right ones. We don't here, though. We use waiter for everyone, apparently.

Just like we don't use dragoness, vixen, etc. We avoid the term that refers to one gender. Waitress applies to females, waiter applies to males and females. The word waitress literally means "female waiter".

See also murse vs. nurse. Murse is for male nurses only while nurse applies to any nurse, male or female. We only use nurse because of this.