Female Women

[Deleted]

I was reading some threads here, and this was bothering me.
Here is an example;

Oh, and God help you if you have females in your guild...

Which brings me to another thing, How come everyone is alot nicer to females when training them to raid than to males? Do you honestly think you're gonna get some from her?

It's certainly not exclusive to this thread and it appears in all forms of media, but seems to be far more common from Americans.

The use of the word "Female". Female what? Foxes, Hedgehogs, Echidna?

The word you're searching for is Woman or Women or Girl(s), we have these wonderful nouns in English that mean a Female Human.
Whenever I read or hear someone say Female even though they clearly mean Women, it always makes me think they're talking about cattle.

In short;
Female is primarily an adjective, Woman is a noun.

Do you use Female as I described? And if so why do you use it rather than Woman/Lady/Girl?

Does this annoy anyone else?

[Frankminimia]

people say males too lol, doesnt bother me

[Warmage]

Maybe they got on mind "player",since you cant really tell if its woman or man,you need to use female/male player.

[Deleted]

While my vitriol spreads equally to the use of Male instead of Men.

I find that woman are far more often used in the way I said, since they are usually being addressed as the subject in a context which supposes that men are the norm.

[Kurdiern]

In your quote, he also used "Males" instead of "Men." I think you're overreacting. I really haven't noticed people saying "Females" over "Woman" and "Men" over "Males" unless it is a very broad subject.

[Deleted]

If I recall correctly, the origin of the word female in latin meant woman, so they are at least historically the same.

[Deleted]

I prefer the terms male/female because they say nothing more about the person than it's gender, it's neutral in that sense and that's the way I like it. The term woman implies more than just the gender, it also implies age and stereotypical behavior, same with the term man. The term man can mean a lot of different things depending on who you ask, the only thing it ever has in common is that the person is male.

[Deleted]

I use female/male in the perspective of their character, as i dont see them as men or women but mere animations.. If i know the gender of the real person i will use men/women

[Deleted]

in trade channel<quote>Does any guy wanna boost a girl through some dungeons</quote> i laughed good when i saw that ^^

[shimerra]

You are aware that in many languages that when something is implied it's quite frequently dropped or substituted? In this case female homo sapien/human/whatever. I say female, you know I'm referring to a female human(usually) therefore I am able to drop human from the sentence. If I were talking about rabbits you'd probably assume I was talking about a female rabbit if I said "The females are a little underweight,". In this case unless they have some sort of weird rabbit player in their guild I think it's safe to the thing being referred to is human.

For example the Japanese for My name is would technically be わたしの*まえはNameさんです. Which translates to My name is Mr./Mrs.(insert name). The Watashi is the word for I/My and the no in between connects the two to indicate that it is my name being talked about. It would also be perfectly acceptable and grammatically correct to drop the Watashi no and simply state quite literally "Name is mr.(Insert Name)," but the implied meaning of both sentences is exactly the same.

I used Japanese as an example just because it illustrates my point a bit better than if I used an English example, mostly because I can't think of one atm that fits as well but it does happen in English/other languages too. Secondly female is both a noun and an adjective, it bugs you because for whatever arbitrary reason you see it as only an adjective or that somehow its use as a noun is less proper. Common usage and multiple dictionaries disagree with you. It may annoy you and that's fine, but I think you know which paragraph I'm referring to when I say it was unnecessarily haughty.

In your quote, he also used "Males" instead of "Men." I think you're overreacting. I really haven't noticed people saying "Females" over "Woman" and "Men" over "Males" unless it is a very broad subject.

Also this. If you're going to be annoyed with how certain words are used in a sentence at least be consistent. If the use of female bugs you the use of male in the exact same fashion should be equally annoying. Doing it out of some weird sense of grammatical chivalry is even more ridiculous than having a problem with proper usage.

[Elexo]

''if you have females in your guild''

Does your guild have any non human members?
Might be the most trivial thing to get upset about I've seen on this website so far..

[Deleted]

Also this. If you're going to be annoyed with how certain words are used in a sentence at least be consistent. Doing it out of some weird sense of grammatical chivalry is even more ridiculous than having a problem with proper usage in the first place.

I replied with my sentiments as regards the use of male vs man too, if you're going to be giving me advice on consistency read 2 posts beyond the OP too =)

But bringing another language into what is essentially a discourse about the use of English seems rather pointless to me.

Does your guild have any non human members?
Might be the most trivial thing to get upset about I've seen on this website so far..

I'm not sure where you get this from I was under the impression that forums are created for Discussion, as apposed to an agony aunt, the fact I post about something doesn't mean I'm "upset" about it.
(Though I have certainly seen pictures of men from guilds I have been in whose species could be called into question)

I'm genuinely surprised no one else finds the use of Fe/male as sounding unnaturally clinical and awkward in this context, perhaps it is just my connection with studying biology where fe/male would be most often used as a noun in the description of lower species

[Itakas]

Potato - potatoe ,tomato - tomatoe, just get over it, its same shit and you know it. The only reason why you are bringing it up, is so you feel proud of your self for being able to show to everyone how you read somewhere something, from some probably demented female human who has troubles with male human, saying thats its oh sooooo insulting to say female instead of woman...

[Prez-]

Who cares what you call them. Honestly, in my eyes, a raider's a raider, no matter who or what he/she does or has between their legs.

[StayTuned]

Does your guild have any non human members?
Might be the most trivial thing to get upset about I've seen on this website so far..

Op must be an English teacher. He clearly falls into the grammar nazi category of people. And the first thing that comes into my mind whentalking about females, are female humans... Not cattle

[Deleted]

Potato - potatoe ,tomato - tomatoe, just get over it, its same shit and you know it. The only reason why you are bringing it up, is so you feel proud of your self for being able to show to everyone how you read somewhere something, from some probably demented female human who has troubles with male human, saying thats its oh sooooo insulting to say female instead of woman...

What? Being Irish I can assure you a potato can have toes but never a toe =p

And in fact I brought it up, then tried to find out more on the subject and found that it seems to be female(adj) authors, who used "female" as a noun, and it was male(adj) authors of the time found it to be an incorrect use of the word. Which following your "logic" would actually make my argument chauvinistic rather than chivalrous. (I don't think it's either it's just rhetoric)

Op must be an English teacher. He clearly falls into the grammar nazi category of people. And the first thing that comes into my mind whentalking about females, are female humans... Not cattle

As I said previously, biology is my field of study, so hence a connotation with lower mammals. Why an English teacher and not a farmer though? =P

[Kasierith]

Ultimately, no language is absolute. While you may have your personal perception of what using "female" implies, and it may be backed up by historical context, what another person believes the word means will affect how they use it. English in particular falls into this, because it is essentially a massive hybrid language that at best loosely follows an outline of logical consistency in its word structure (for example, if goose becomes geese, why doesn't moose become meese?). In this situation, when talking about a guild, I highly doubt that he was considering the possibility that a non human species would be sitting down and playing a computer game. Given the fact that English is malleable and he was operating within the understanding that those he was referring to were automatically human, I don't find anything particularly wrong with his word choice, especially since he was approaching the word from a social perspective as opposed to operating within biological discourse. If you are working within biology, you add extra significance to that word beyond what would be used by the general population.

[shimerra]

I replied with my sentiments as regards the use of male vs man too, if you're going to be giving me advice on consistency read 2 posts beyond the OP too =)

But bringing another language into what is essentially a discourse about the use of English seems rather pointless to me.

I am consistent, at least in regard to the grammar point you take issue with. I am equally not offended by the proper usage, as it was in the sentence you posted, of male and female because it is in fact proper usage. What I am not though is thorough because I glazed over your second post in the thread . Shit happens at 4 am I suppose my bad.

Either way my own glossing over the thread aside you completely missed the entire point of my post. I used an example from Japanese but the exact same thing happens in English. Different languages, same exact grammatical issue being brought up here. It happens in probably every language on Earth, or at least it does in the ones I have studied. Hell you even stated as someone who studies biology you do the exact same thing in your field of study when referring to "lower species". I can just simply swap my consistency complaint from what I mistook as a male/female human inconsistency to one about why using male/female bugs you for people but not for animals. Somehow you've changed the connotation of female to something that implies an animal when that just isn't the case. Not really much else needs to be said about that.

To reiterate: The point being that your annoyance at what is a very standard and relatively speaking universal practice is entirely arbitrary in that you apparently only take issue with it in this specific instance. Like I said it's fine if it annoys you we've all got our own weird things that bugs us, it just not a particularly sensible thing to be bugged about.

[Sylar Hao]

Male and Female are nouns too, and, even if there are dedicated words for each human gender, we still belong to the animal reign, so, naming us Male and Females is ok for me, even if it sounds a bit weird

[Deleted]

The point being that your "annoyance" at what is a very standard and relatively speaking universal practice is entirely arbitrary in that you apparently only take issue with it in this specific instance. Like I said it's fine if it annoys you we've all got our own weird things that bugs us, it just not a particularly sensible thing to be bugged about.

It doesn't seem standard to me though, it's something I've encountered very rarely if at all with other Irish people or Brits for that matter. I wouldn't go as far as to say all European English speakers as many are of course influenced by American English.

As for the use when dealing with lower species, there often aren't better words to use for males and females of such. Bulls is a male Bovine, Cow is a female, but cattle are also called cows (both male and female), similarly we call females chickens or hens, males cocks or roosters, but we call the species and the food chicken. In a great deal of cases however you may not know a specific name for the male or female of the species. In these cases the convention has a huge advantage.

You have however at least provided a well thought out argument.
I was also hoping to gauge the influence of the Atlantic on this use too.

---------- Post added 2012-04-23 at 12:45 PM ----------

Male and Female are nouns too, and, even if there are dedicated words for each human gender, we still belong to the animal reign, so, naming us Male and Females is ok for me, even if it sounds a bit weird

So you would agree that it sounds strange? I done a search, since it says you're from Seville, I used the Spanish word for Female - Hembra, and the google images results shows nearly entirely non-human females.
So wouldn't this usage seem even stranger to you?