I have never had a gift for divining the gender of a noun in a foreign language. I almost invariably get it wrong. Not long ago, I came upon a notebook that I kept in an effort to master the genders of nouns in Modern Greek. They come in masculine, feminine, and neuter, as in Latin and German, and they have endings that sometimes offer a clue (-omicron sigma for masculine, -eta for feminine, -omicron for neuter), but just as often are deceptive. Many of the words have decayed since antiquity—a sigma has fallen off—so a word might look neuter yet retain its ancient gender, which might, despite a masculine-looking ending, have been feminine all along. Determined to get this gender thing under control, I marked each noun with the symbols from alchemy: a circle with arrow pointing up, as if with an erection, for masculine; a circle with cross descending, as if in childbirth, for feminine. I had to invent a symbol for neuter: a circle with both the arrow and the cross, and a slash through it, as on a “no pedestrians” sign. It was pathetic. It looked as if I were trying to lock the nouns up in cages.
Later, when I studied Italian, I used free association as a mnemonic device, laboriously memorizing the gender of every word, one at a time. It was easy enough with the equivalents of our vocation words. In Italian, poetessa is not an insult; it is simply the feminine form of “poet,” as dottoressa, contessa, professoressa are feminine forms of “doctor,” “count,” “professor.” But the word bicchiere, say, meaning “glass”: how could I remember that it was masculine? Sounds like beaker, which reminds me of chemistry and of Louis Pasteur, a chemist, who was a man: ergo bicchiere was masculine. But sometimes the beaker would remind me of Madame Curie, also a chemist, who was a woman, and I’d get confused. For bottiglia, “bottle,” if the a at the end wasn’t enough to tell me it was feminine, I could think of a bottle of beer with the St. Pauli girl on it. Latte, “milk,” was masculine, which seemed counterintuitive, because it’s the woman who lactates. I fell back on my experience as a milkman: latte, masculine. Obviously, if you grow up in a gendered language, you digest these forms along with your mother’s (masculine) milk, and perhaps if I had been given Latin to play with as a child I’d have had an easier time with the concept of gender later in life.