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Is "female" offensive? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

280 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] 2 points 8 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 8 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 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.