I just had a friendly discussion with one of the drafters at work about the word "songster," as he was editing a commendation letter written for a high school choir. First, he changed "songsters" to "singers" but chose in the end to write "students." We felt the word "songster" was antiquated, but my searching did not indicate that. Anyone?

The suffix -ster is one bit of morphology with a history. Originally, it was a feminine agentive suffix in Old English. Placed on verbs it created agentive nouns, many of which still survive as family names based on professions: e.g., Baxter (from bake), Webster (from weave), Brewster (from brew). When Norman French came in with the conquering troops, at some point during the Middle English period, the suffix was re-analyzed to be -ter / -tor, the Romance masculine agentive suffix. At this point, a new feminine agentive suffix was created by fusing the older -(s)ter with the Romance -ess (originally from a rare Greek suffix -issa): -stress, as in seamstress.

To me, it's not so much antiquated as it is contemptuous. I'm not sure why. Perhaps by analogy with rhymester, which is a contemptuous term for a poor and petty poet such as I.