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Comment by mgamache | Hacker News Reader

I am being pedantic, but I hate the word mentee. I am not sure if it was made up, but it sounds like it. The proper word IMHO is protege.

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You hate it because mentor _is not_ adding the -er suffix to a verb like ment or some such. -er and its opposite -ee suffix are strictly english/germanic in origin (although possibly adapted from Latin at some point, there aren't Latin equivalents)

Mentor is of greek and latin extraction directly, there's no -er suffix added to a verb, it is a noun outright.

It is ... inappropriate to match mentor with mentee because the former doesn't have the -er suffix.

Obviously all words are "made up" but mentor/mentee doesn't follow existing patterns, it was just created by people who don't know or care and has persisted.

In the Odyssey, Mentor was a sort of advisor to Odysseus and that is presumably where the word comes from.

Nitpick: he was Odysseus’s buddy who was assigned to look after Odysseus’s son Telemachus (and while we are at it, a lot of the “mentoring” was done by Athena disguised as Mentor), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentor_(Odyssey)

I would replace mentee with telemachus. That’s who mentor taught!

It’s not the same thing. A protege is one person done your are grooming to be your replacement. A mentee is one of many people your are guiding down their own path.

This was always my understanding of the word too, but I've just looked it up and apparently a protégé is just "one who is protected or trained or whose career is furthered by a person of experience, prominence, or influence" so in a mentor-student relationship the student could definitely be referred to as a protégé.

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