Using "woman" in place of "female"

I’d say it depend on circumstances. Sucking up to a client makes business sense. But were I to have to denote employee’s sex for some reason in an email do I need to use a database to send out “woman employee” to one select group and “female employee” and “cis gendered XX chromosome employee” to yet others? I’m gonna say “no” to that.

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Certainly not the OP:

You did read the OP before posting, right?

No I incorrectly responded to someone who was claiming that you shouldn’t use nouns as adjectives. Neither of us apparently read the OP.

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Well, to be fair, you do seem to be the first person to name the usage as “noun adjunct” :slight_smile:

If someone used this phrase in our office, it might be an even bigger issue.

I suppose it might. However, I should point out, it isn’t a gendered or sexual phrase in its current usage.

[quote=“Oxford American Dictionary”]suck-up |ˈsəkəp|
nounN. Amer. informal
a person who behaves obsequiously, especially to earn approval or favoritism.[/quote]

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I’m with @Aloisius and @Skeptic. “Woman” used as an adjective seems odd to my ears too. If I’d say “male x” then I’ll use “female x” as required.

Tangentially relevant, but on the (rare) occasions when a woman hasn’t wanted to see me, a male doctor, they usually asked “Can I see a lady doctor?” The subsequent conversation with the female colleagues I’ve asked to stand in for me usually started with her wondering (in jest) whether she really was sufficiently ladylike, or not … :laughing:

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Same reason we have “her” and “hers” but only “his?”

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What’s wrong with "Doctress?

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seconded.[quote=“aeon, post:47, topic:75512”]
Tangentially relevant, but on the (rare) occasions when a woman hasn’t wanted to see me, a male doctor, they usually asked “Can I see a lady doctor?”
[/quote]

Are you a gynecologist?

This tells you more about the values of a society than it does about the importance of grammar.

Some of the comments in this thread do the very same thing.

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My favorite outdated gendered term for a profession is “aviatrix.” Sounds naughty but fun.

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It tells you a lot about a society that has abandoned the principles of grammar.

O tempora o mores!

So you use “Zie” as a gender neutral pronoun?

Because of misogyny?

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I tried singing “female” instead of “woman” and it really ruined this song:

But “Medicine female” sounds interesting, like a typical awkward translation from a Native American tongue into English. “Your medicine female cured my fire wound with soothing balm.” That works, in context anyway.

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No, an anaesthetist (anesthesiologist to you, based on your spelling of gynaecology! :wink: ).

I haven’t been asked for a ‘lady doctor’ in a long while. It happened when I was working in the Emergency Department or on the wards as very junior doctor. And then I used to get “You’re too young; I don’t want you I want a proper doctor.” :disappointed: … more often than not wanting a male doctor.

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But it works as a noun with the title of that horrible show and John Lennon’s song, of which I’m still not fan.

I’m just saying using the word woman as an adjective hurts my ears. It’s kind of like when people make nouns out of verbs (I almost wrote “make verb nouns”).

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Woman doctor could be a verb too.

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Sure. But all languages are constantly changing and evolving, and there’s not much we can do about it. The history of the English language is pretty fascinating, there were attempts hundreds of years ago to “freeze” the language in some perfect state, and ban “foreign” words, except at that point a lot of the language was already borrowed from French (so it was unclear where “English” as a true codified language begins.)

There’s awkward in terms of subtext/context, and awkward in terms of phonetics, but maybe that’s a different debate.

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