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Is "female" offensive? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

286 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am not a native English speaker and I have sometimes referred to people as male and female (as that is what I have been taught) but I have received some backlash in some cases, especially for the word "female", is there some negative thought in the word which I am unaware of?

I don't know if this is the best place to ask, if it's not appropriate I have no problem to delete it ^^

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

“the suspect is a six foot, white male"

think that's because the descriptors come after the noun in reporting

No they don’t. The word “male” is the noun here.

Why did people upvote that?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Because it's still acting as a descriptor rather than an identifier, despite playing the syntactic role of a noun instead of an adjective. It's more about semantics in this case than syntax.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No it is playing the syntactic role of a noun. An object is a noun.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I know it's playing the syntactic role of a noun, that's what I said. But it's playing the semantic role of a descriptor. The "thing" being described here is a suspect, one that is white and also male, as opposed to a male who is white and also suspected.

Syntactically, the word male was a noun. But semantically, it's still just describing the suspect, rather than identifying the thing to be described.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (3 children)

"Suspect" is the noun

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Both are nouns. Suspect is the subject, male is the object. You could replace it with, for example "the suspect is a cat", and I think we can all agree "cat" is a noun. "six foot" and "white" are the adjectives in that sentence.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Both are nouns there. Suspect is the subject.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

So you don’t think this argument would hold up if they said “Police are searching for a six foot white male”?