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Comment by ashark | Hacker News Reader

I continue to find the use of "woman" or "women" as an adjective to be really grating. "Women firefighters", for example—we don't say "men nurses", ya know? Reads/sounds awful to me, like we're referring to someone who only fights fires for (on?) women, or does nursing stuff for men. To take dictionary.com's adjectival example, "woman plumber" seems like a gross euphemism for a gynecologist. Imagine "man teacher". Wow is that an ugly and misleading construction.

It seems like we only started doing it because someone decided "female" was suddenly a word to be avoided regardless of context, for reasons that elude me. "Male" seems to still be fine, fortunately.

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I think the point is that using "male/female" as a noun is clinical and dehumanizing, but there aren't any issues with using the words as an adjective.

"Male" and "female" are fine as adjectives, but "female" as a noun is routinely used as a derogative, and definitely has that connotation in (at least parts of) the US.

I'm told it's not that way in the military, but it definitely is in many subcultures. Working with poor urban kids, I saw this all the time. "Don't listen to that female", etc. It's not something progressives just came up with--it's very much used as a derogatory term by a lot of people in the US.

(There is also the probably-related progressive concept of "people-first language"--you're not an "addict", you're a person who's addicted. Funnily enough, my first introduction to this was Cryptonomicon, and only in the past couple years have I heard it pushed by progressives.)

I think women find most of these clarifiers (that's how I see it, anyway) as a title worth being proud of. They've overcame social and potentially physical adversity to obtain this position (Female Firefighter, etc.)

I've probably heard Male Nurse vs. Nurse (who's a male) about 50/50 at this point. As the world learns that gender is not a prerequisite for nearly every job title, then these gender qualifiers will probably diminish.

Language is a slippery slope though. I don't think it should be read into too much.

I don't care about using a sex/gender modifier on the names of the positions, but using the adjectives women/men woman/man instead of female/male. Comes off really weird to me. We don't do it for men, we use "male X", which sounds/reads way better, and until very recently we just used "female X" too—I think the allergy to over/misuse of the noun "female" has bled over into these phrases, too, and the result is jarring and strange.

[EDIT] word "noun" where I intended "adjective" fixed.

- man nurse

- man housekeeper

- man secretary

- man escort

Wow, these all sound absolutely awful. How did the female, err, woman version become such an accepted construct?

+1, I read Woman Firefighter and auto-corrected it to Female Firefighter without second thought.

>we don't say "men nurses", ya know?

It's much worse! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murse

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