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 ^^
Female as an adjective is perfectly fine.
A female patient, a female politician, a female customer, etc. That’s the best way to refer to those.
What’s bad is using ‘female’ as a noun: "A female. "
In general, you just don’t use adjectives-as-nouns to refer to people. You don’t call someone “a gay”, “a black”, or “a Chinese”. That is offensive, and “a female” has the same kind of feel.
(there are exceptions to the above: you can call someone ‘an American’ or 'A German", but not “A French”. I don’t understand why - if you can’t feel your way, best just avoid it)
Now, you could get around it by calling someone “a female person” - except that we already have a word for “female person”, and that’s “woman”. And to go out of your way to avoid saying “woman” makes you sound like some kind of incel weirdo, and you don’t want that.
Interesting point with adjectives vs nouns.
‘a Frenchman’ would be more correct than ‘a French’. Because French is only an adjective, while American and German are both nouns and adjectives. But Frenchman is not gender neutral like German or American.
Could go with Francophone, but that’s any french speaking person so that includes canadians, africans, etc.
And, it would seem to make sense to go with Frank, but the Franks were originally germans, then expanded their territory to include France, and the name stuck there but not in their original territory, so is it really correct to refer to the French as Franks? Since no one does it, I would guess not.
Not a native speaker here. Would a French woman also be 'a Frenchman’s and if not, how would you refer to a French woman correctly?
3 years ago, “man” in that context was considered gender neutral. More recently tho a lot of stink is being made about little language things like this. Theres no replacement word to use.
It’s been a lot longer than 3 years. My city changed policeman and fireman to police officer and firefighter almost two decades ago.
I am very skeptical of this 3 year timeframe lining up with the end of Trump’s presidency and the right leaning into this anti-woke position.
Sensitivities during Covid ran high. A lot of things changed then. For instance in the software world removing the name “master” from git usage, and on the TV Show Survivor, the host not saying his famous line “come on in guys”. At the same time pronouns became a huge thing, and these seemingly gender specific or sensitive word terms were targeted.
You are correct, there was a round of this in the 90s or so, where job titles like “waitress”, “stewardess”, “policeman” were all adjusted. I see that as a very different round of language change.
GitHub changed their terminology in ~2020, but it’s been a controversial term for years before that. I remember master/slave hard drive terminology being set aside in early 2010s. And I was just grunt level, hourly IT at the time.
Yeah, 2020 is the time period I’m referring to. I had never heard of it being a thing until George Floyd and BLM movement in 2020, then GitHub changed in response to that.
I’ve been in IT for 35 years. And I never heard a single negative thing about branch names and master/slave terminology until 2020.
Perhaps you think that was set aside because IDE hard drives are dead.
It goes even further back than I was aware, to 2003.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3243656.stm
My sticking point in your original statement is that all this “sensitivity” is new, allegedly aligning with covid and George Floyd and BLM. That’s not the case and it minimizes the decades of work people have spent trying to influence language to be more inclusive.
3 years ago may be when pearl-clutchers started reaching a critical volume to where media saw the dollar signs in catering to them.