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Every time I see the word used outside of a biological context, I imagine the person looks like this:
Female is a great adjective but an inappropriate noun.
That's a good way to put it.
is it just grammar or just incels ruining that word?
A bit of the second one, but not fully? I don't think using "female" as a noun when talking about a person sounded good, but it's appropriate for animals. I imagine incels chose that because it wasn't the way people spoke, but was only weird at worst, so it wasn't that suspicious initially.
it helps if you read females like tamales.
Hey, I always do that when it's used as a noun!
Oh man, that's gonna stick in my brain. Great, thanks.
I'm forced to read "spectacles" like a Greek because of a post like this.
Where'd you get that bag?
Oh, it's a shemale
I hope that you can extend some grace to people born in different eras. When I hear something like "woman employee," I hear my Greatest Generation grandparents, and believe me, neither "woman doctor" or "woman driver," nor any similar construction was complimentary.
I think it was the Boomers who started to use "female" as an adjective, because it sounded clinical, descriptive, and non-judgemental. So "female employee" sounds much better to my ear. (But, FWIW, the use of "female" as a noun is total cringe.)
Yeah, inceldom has coopted the word, and now I hear that "woman doctor" is preferred, but it's not always easy to remember that on the fly when you grew up with the opposite connotation.
My comment was more about the use of "female" as a noun, but your comment about which to use as an adjective raises an interesting point, especially because, as you mention, the generation to regularly say things like "woman doctor" in a not-so-great way has mostly died out. I'm not sure where things stand currently on which adjective is preferred; I think it's mostly contextual at the moment? (Like "I would feel more comfortable being examined by a woman doctor" sounds grammatically a touch clunky but connotatively fine to me, whereas "I can't believe what that idiot female doctor diagnosed me with" sounds grammatically correct but otherwise awful)
how much I hate the euphemism treadmill.
It's so weird how they flip both of those words around. Like, they'll say "females" instead of women, but then, they'll say "a woman doctor."
Woman doctor is much older, and makes grammatical sense under the assumption that doctor is an exclusively male title. Female doctor implies that male and female are both ordinary categories of doctors.
Edit: while “females” is a reference to the Ferengi in Star Trek DS9.
That’s such an American take.
Here in Australia female doctor makes grammatical sense, and woman doctor sounds ridiculous. Woman doctor would have the same assumption as it also has an opposite in man doctor, which sounds equally as ridiculous unlike male doctor.
Now you could say my doctor is a woman and that makes perfect sense whereas my doctor is a female is ferengi.
Woman doctor and nan doctor are just gynecologist and andrologist
Isn't a "nan doctor" a grandgynocologist?
Or a gerontologist.
But only if you look around and then covertly gesture at your genitals while saying it.
I think it would be “Doctrix” in older versions of English.
The -trix suffix was dead long before there were many female doctors, only surviving in dominatrix.
When my grandparents died, my mother kept referring to herself as the executrix while handling the estate. People would visibly cringe every time she did, until I got her to stop.
Executrix is still common when dealing with estates tho?
Perhaps it varies regionally, but even the lawyer cringed, and didn’t use it himself.
Yeah, I only discovered the word when I read “doctoress” in a translation I was proofing and knew there was something going on there.
This one has bitten me in the ass. Male and female are incredibly common terms in the medical community, but I try to limit my use of female to work only, if at all. On the plus side, I've learned I rarely need to use it at work. It literally only matters if we're doing a deep dive into what's potentially going on and need to branch out to figure it out
Although with the distinction between gender and sex continually becoming more prevalent in the zeitgeist, I find myself using the terms "male" and "female" more often than I used to.
I found myself using female and male a lot after visiting a certain e621
spe'fy what show (in Dm if you prefer)
I might specify more often to clarify, like "All the female medalists/athletes," but that's quite different from when you hear someone say "Oh, you know how females can be." It's like their vocalization process includes a filter that converts "bitches" to "female" at some point between the first thought and actual speech, because they finally got the memo that not everyone is a misogynist like they are. You can hear the disdain in their voices when they say the word female.
Non-native speakers in shambles. On the other hand, even males are not safe from us