In current American English, “female” has shifted to usually being an adjective, woman is a noun. Referring to people by noun-ing one of the adjectives that describes them is something considered reductive by a chunk of the population.
If someone is a fan of “female” as a noun: I’m not going to change your mind. I get that changing language is annoying sometimes. I’m pointing out that “female” as a noun does bother some people, “woman” only bothers people if they know it’s been changed and see it as bowing to PC pressure. Since most people don’t check the diffs from one edition to another when buying books, this is a really easy decision on the part of the publisher, who just wants to quietly make money for the most part.
As a native English speaker, I find it hard to keep up and understand everything that’s now been deemed inappropriate. I can’t imagine how a non native would understand.
Seems like there is an effort to intentionally keep making it more complex to show who really keeps up with twitter the most.
I don’t have a twitter account to get updates on this, so I just try to avoid nouning adjectives related to any hot button issues. I dunno, I’m not the Word Police, just interested in avoiding unnecessary conflict.
I’d hope that most people would give the benefit of the doubt people who aren’t native English speakers, though.
"[first thing] does bother some people, [second thing] only bothers people if they [condition]."
That phrasing (in particular "does" vs. "only") makes it sound like being bothered by the first thing is inherently justified but being bothered by the second thing isn't. And why do you specify the condition that will cause the second thing to bother the people but leave it ambiguous for the first thing?
"Woman" does bother some people because they have always used the word that way whereas "female" only bothers people who are hell bent on changing language.
> Referring to people by noun-ing one of the adjectives that describes them
The noun sense of female well precedes (going back to its Latin roots) the adjectival sense of the word. [1] The adjectival sense came from the noun, the exact reverse of what you are saying.
And this pattern of adjectives coming from nouns (e.g. leafy, greasy, beautiful, harmful, dangerous, adventurous) is common, while the reverse is not (I'm hard put to think of even one example). So what you are saying here is a nonsense, with no scholarly basis to it.
If someone is a fan of “female” as a noun: I’m not going to change your mind. I get that changing language is annoying sometimes. I’m pointing out that “female” as a noun does bother some people, “woman” only bothers people if they know it’s been changed and see it as bowing to PC pressure. Since most people don’t check the diffs from one edition to another when buying books, this is a really easy decision on the part of the publisher, who just wants to quietly make money for the most part.