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It's just being used to coerce a clinical reading, like some sort of wildlife observer, relax. "The female builds her nest in the late summer..." Adjectives an

It's just being used to coerce a clinical reading, like some sort of wildlife observer, relax. "The female builds her nest in the late summer..." Adjectives and nouns are slippery things, and compound nouns exist besides. FWIW, a quick corpus search of COCA[1] for `DET female VERB` [(a|the) female (eats|plays|chooses...)] yields 63 total attestations in the corpus (59 unique). The same with `male` yields 65 (57 unique). So it's a thing that happens in English. 1 https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/ https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/

OJFord 4y ago
> It's just being used to coerce a clinical reading, like some sort of wildlife observer, relax. "The female builds her nest in the late summer..." That's an abbreviation of 'the female of the species' which is essentially writing out a definition of 'woman' except for the given species, since a woman is a human and there probably generally isn't an equivalent (and if there is it won't be widely known) for most species. Other than to humorous effect (Wodehouse was fond of it) it is redundant and not useful for describing humans. The female of the human species is called a woman, and this is widely known. > relax > So it's a thing that happens in English. I don't have to like it. Using the wrong their/they're/there is also 'a thing that happens in English', if by English we mean the words of people aiming to use it.
- WaxProlix 4y ago
  > That's an abbreviation of 'the female of the species' which is essentially An interesting intuition, do you have anything to back it up? > I don't have to like it. Now that I empathize with, but I don't think there's much to be done in this case.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    > An interesting intuition, do you have anything to back it up? It (unlike the shortening) is grammatical, and a common enough phrase to have a Wikipedia disambiguation page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_of_the_Species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_of_the_Species
    - WaxProlix 4y ago
      Sure, do you have anything to back up your intuition that this is just a shortening of one phrase? Where would you find this 'shortening' acceptable, and where would you not? "A female will find multiple mates in spring" "The male burrows deep into the ground in the winter and begins to hibernate" These seem fine to me and are not strict shortenings of "The Female of the Species".

OJFord 4y ago

> It's just being used to coerce a clinical reading, like some sort of wildlife observer, relax. "The female builds her nest in the late summer..." That's an abbreviation of 'the female of the species' which is essentially writing out a definition of 'woman' except for the given species, since a woman is a human and there probably generally isn't an equivalent (and if there is it won't be widely known) for most species. Other than to humorous effect (Wodehouse was fond of it) it is redundant and not useful for describing humans. The female of the human species is called a woman, and this is widely known. > relax > So it's a thing that happens in English. I don't have to like it. Using the wrong their/they're/there is also 'a thing that happens in English', if by English we mean the words of people aiming to use it.

WaxProlix 4y ago
> That's an abbreviation of 'the female of the species' which is essentially An interesting intuition, do you have anything to back it up? > I don't have to like it. Now that I empathize with, but I don't think there's much to be done in this case.
- OJFord 4y ago
  > An interesting intuition, do you have anything to back it up? It (unlike the shortening) is grammatical, and a common enough phrase to have a Wikipedia disambiguation page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_of_the_Species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_of_the_Species
  - WaxProlix 4y ago
    Sure, do you have anything to back up your intuition that this is just a shortening of one phrase? Where would you find this 'shortening' acceptable, and where would you not? "A female will find multiple mates in spring" "The male burrows deep into the ground in the winter and begins to hibernate" These seem fine to me and are not strict shortenings of "The Female of the Species".