I am not a native English speaker and I have sometimes referred to people as male and female (as that is what I have been taught) but I have received some backlash in some cases, especially for the word “female”, is there some negative thought in the word which I am unaware of?

I don’t know if this is the best place to ask, if it’s not appropriate I have no problem to delete it ^^

    • Jojo@lemm.ee
      31·
      9 months ago

      Because it’s still acting as a descriptor rather than an identifier, despite playing the syntactic role of a noun instead of an adjective. It’s more about semantics in this case than syntax.

        • Jojo@lemm.ee
          2·
          9 months ago

          I know it’s playing the syntactic role of a noun, that’s what I said. But it’s playing the semantic role of a descriptor. The “thing” being described here is a suspect, one that is white and also male, as opposed to a male who is white and also suspected.

          Syntactically, the word male was a noun. But semantically, it’s still just describing the suspect, rather than identifying the thing to be described.

      • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
        8·
        9 months ago

        Both are nouns. Suspect is the subject, male is the object. You could replace it with, for example “the suspect is a cat”, and I think we can all agree “cat” is a noun. “six foot” and “white” are the adjectives in that sentence.