This strikes me as rather contradictory with your comments below, at least if we limit the argument to the use of "the female" alone. You agreed that "the female" is unusual, though "not unheard of", for every-day use referring to a woman. Is it any surprise then that when the term *is* used referring to a woman, in a sensitive context, people are inclined to associate it with the more common meaning? And - I'm just theorizing here, obviously I don't actually know how exactly the connotation was created in my mind - I suppose that after having concluded that "the female" was derogatory, I concluded that "females" in the plural must be too, not realizing that there might be a difference somehow.

I said that it was uncommon but not unheard of to use "female" in the singular referring to a human female in place of woman- not "the female". There's a difference, which is why I tried doing other searches that didn't involve articles or copulas. The latter is an archaic grammatical construction that made a noun generic when combined with the definite article. It's no longer in contemporary use, though in clinical use and biological it still can hold as a technical term, I think. Still, I've never heard it used ordinarily.



Your never having encountered it before is of course an important factor to note, but Vivien and Aeryn have encountered it before, so it's really anecdotal evidence on either side. I have also encountered it before, and unlike what you said in your reply to Vivien below (in direct contradiction to what I had already told you, I might add), that's got nothing to do with my native language, which doesn't have any cognates of "female". Since you continually stress that you are talking about American English, I should of course add that my own English is a mixture of British and American, but judging by snoop's reply, this isn't an issue of British vs. American.

And you're not a native speaker raised here, so you (probably) aren't aware of how it's used without that connotation here almost completely in ordinary language. I was arguing against broad claims as to its connotation.


Actually, if you read Celia's posts properly, you'll find that she's quite aware of the issue - she says she understands how it sounds, and judging from her rant on the issue, this really isn't the first time that she's discussed or thought about the negative connotations of the word. So that makes three Americans who *are* familiar with this connotation, even if one of those thinks it's stupid.

If I'm not mistaken Celia expressed familiarity with the terms being used in a clinical setting with the connotation of biological reductionism, since she works as a vet. She's familiar with the words' use in a clinical setting, not that somehow this connotation has carried over into ordinary speech. She expressely grouses that it's a synonym for male and female, and that's that, so to speak. She had never heard of the objection Vivien raised.



And frankly, I don't see Vivien "vacillating".

I made a case for it below. Not only vacillating, but falling back on dubious claims about grammar to help strengthen the broad sweep of her argument. Then, a focus on the feelings. But if you don't want to read it that way I definitely can't stop you. An honest reading of when she brings up which arguments supports it, though, I think.



Evidently it's a connotation that doesn't exist for some, which I admit is a surprise to me, and perhaps also to Vivien. Equally evidently, it does exist for others. No doubt there will be social or geographical groups of people among whom it's more widespread than among others, our sample of people here is rather too small to say more than that...

That's very true. Frankly, I wasn't expecting to get into anything quantitative here. I address this general topic in my reply to you below. I've no objections with a weaker exhortation, without all of the overreaching factual claims bundled with it. Vivien's articles support that, certainly. But the articles also reveal that the connotation has been incredibly ambiguous for hundreds of years with no definite, universal connotation emerging. My experience supports that if anything, local to this time and nation, it happens to be skewing towards non-reductive. All in all enough variance to argue against the claims above.






You'd have to ask them. I was under the impression that they were more fluent in English than in Russian and that for all extents and purposes English was their native language.


I don't think that it's a coincidence that, for instance, the author of the article that sparked this discussion talks about a text "written by a female with femalist themes". Surely you agree that "written by a woman with feminist themes" would've been the expected phrasing, and that the author is making a point of some sort by using "female" and then coining his neologism "femalist" (Wiktionary informs me that this word was in fact in use in a unrelated sense in the past, but for all extents and purposes I think we can agree it's a neologism here).

My impression was that the author was remarking on the fact that even though The Hunger Games purports to be feminist and many interpret it as such, it is in fact something different and less genuine despite seeming to be almost identical, so he used an effective synonym and a similar, but slightly off term for the almost-but-not-really-feminism movement.. I doubt he was making a claim that it was about baby making more than liberty? He could be using "female" disparagingly though. I've never argued that is hasn't been.


And then there is more (anecdotal, true) evidence: for instance, one of the hits for your search on "female that" yields the phrase "sex-crazed female". As I suspected, this seems to be more common than "sex-crazed woman" - even though "female" is used much less than "woman". Which reminds me of the fixed expression "red-blooded male". In both cases, it rather seems to me that the usage of "male/female" rather than "man/woman" is not coincidental, and has to do with the focus on sex.

Uh, this is weird. As in, almost irrelevant. "Female who" would inevitably yield plenty of nasty and reductive things too. I didn't see an overwhelmingly sexual focus on the results returned by "female that".


In short, even among those who never thought of the noun "female" as offensive in any way, I would think that there is still a difference in usage between "female" and "woman", with "woman" being clearly the more neutral and cautious term to use in a discussion of feminism (in a medical discussion, not so much). But I could be wrong.

"Woman" is definitely the more cautious term, that much has been made clear over the course of the argument. My point is that the ordinary usage simply does not have a biological connotation, not that it's simply "not offensive", with the result being that it would never occur to an American to err on the side of safety, since they would not be aware of any difference between the two terms.



If I understand correctly what you're talking about with the Greek example, then I believe German does it, yes - Dutch does for sure. I don't know that that has much to do with it, though, because if you focus only on the difference between definite and indefinite articles, the same should apply to "woman", which isn't the case.

I think the indefinite article does it to some extent too. That's why I was shoe-horning the relative in there to see what happened. Unless I'm misunderstanding you?



That strikes me as even worse - that people would use "that" instead of "who". Of course, that's quite common in English in general, so it might be a bit silly to focus on it here, but at least with "a female who", the "who" makes it unambiguously about humans. "A female that" really sounds like you're talking about animals, but evidently it is indeed not unheard of to use it for humans.