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The word's meaning proves as debatable as who is-or isn't-one.
The word "ballerina." according to the Oxford English Dictionary, originated in the late 1700s and was the feminine of ballenno. Italian for "dancing master." which descended from the Latin bailare, "to dance." More recent definitions include Merriam-Webster's "a woman who is a ballet dancer" and American Heritage's "a principal woman dancer in a ballet company." The word, one might say. dances about, never landing in a precise fifth position.
It is not incorrect, if we go by Merriam-Webster. to call a corps girl a ballerina, and those who don't know much about ballet blithely apply the term to anyone who wears pointe shoes. Yet the more one knows about this art the more reverence one brings to the word, perhaps because it is the last vestige of those vaunted titles of yore- "prima ballerina" and "prima ballerina assoluta'-mantles of esteem that were earned like a knighthood and bestowed by queen, country or company director. Such titles are now defunct, having been replaced by the gender-neutral, everyone's-equal "principal dancer." (The Paris Opéra Ballet is the exception, calling its principals étoiles. or "stars." but then. France was the birthplace of ballet and is a law unto itself.) Today, no queen is handing out diplomas in ballerinadom. It is an invisible crown that comes to a dancer on invisible hands.
There are different views, of course, as to which dancers are wearing that crown. Last July, an article in The New York Times created a tempest among balletomanes when it attempted to define the American ballerina...