Teacher is to Student as Mentor is to Protégé.
It’s not “Mentee”, it’s “Protégé.”
I’m not a language Nazi, but I do dislike it when words are made up to replace other words that work just fine. I think that ‘mentee’ has been so abused that it has actually become a word.
In college, the 5th year students (my major – architecture – required 5 years) were asked to mentor 1st year students. The other students kept referring to those which they were mentoring as their mentees. Now I’ve been given abuse for using bad English, so it really got under my skin when the abusers would give me a hard time for correcting them in this instance.
I’ve heard this word used far too often since then as well.
The other word that I cringed at in college was “Orientated” (“I orientated the building this way to…”). It’s “Oriented”. You oriented the building.
(end rant)
Maybe all the mentors and ‘mentees’ are mental? There are words like those that annoy me as well. Mostly the one that bothers me is when people put “ya’ll” meaning “y’all” So annoying! Especially vexing when it’s in an advertisment where you’d think that they hire people the spell/grammar check those kinds of things.
Y’all is more of a regional thing that we don’t use here in Minnesota. I like it and would use it more if it were more common and acceptable here though. I get what you’re saying though, it seems clear to me where the apostrophe should go.
The opposite of the spelling errors can be quite annoying to. I’ve had my writing nit-picked to death before, and it is quite frustrating. I try to spell check when/where I can, but I have limits. Something like an advertisement should be nit-picked though. There are people who enjoy editing other people’s writing to find spelling and grammatical errors. My wife reviews legal documents all day long and loves finding the errors that no one else has caught.(She’ll be the English teacher when we have kids and start home schooling).