The Code-Breaking Women Who Unmasked Soviet Spies
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
If it's declassified, are the raw cipher publically available (the decoded and nondecoded ones)?
If anyone knows if the raw ciphertexts with metadata (say date, source/"lane") are available please share! I think it would be more fun and educational to exercise on real quasi-OTP ciphertexts...
I do hate such abuse of language. Would the Smithsonian have written 'a man mathematician'? Of course not.
In English you can very often use a noun to qualify another noun (like in "house brick"), but it's rare for "A B" to mean "B which is an A" (more often it's something like "B for an A" or "B concerning an A").
The form "Woman X" is relatively recent (it's appearing because using "female" for humans is becoming mildly taboo), so it seems odd to someone who isn't used to it.
I am, and I'm not aware of any. But if there are, they probably grew out of the weird taboos that, in some segments of English-speaking culture, tightly control what terms one is permitted to use when speaking about gender-related issues. Most of us, fortunately, don't consider ourselves bound by these taboos.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=referring+to+women+as+females&t=ip...
Perhaps you could point to a specific example where "it implies grouping women with female animals rather than grouping them together with men as human beings."
I'm rather surprised I'm getting so much pushback on this here, of all places. I thought it would be pretty obvious to most of the English as first language population here.
The articles that you link say that using "female" as a noun is somewhat demeaning. OK, I can agree with that.
What I don't get is how using "female" as an adjective can be demeaning at all? This is a different question that seems very surprising as a non-native speaker. Using the noun "woman" as an adjective (in apposition) is maybe grammatically correct, but sounds very strange to me.
As far as I know, these notions do not usually come from (a) studies showing e.g. that, if you have people read text using one phrase or the other, and then give them questions designed to evaluate their opinions of disabled people, you see an actual effect; or from (b) a statistically significant sample of actual disabled people saying they really would prefer one phrase over the other; but usually from (c) an academic thinking something up and writing about it, and other people reading about it and adopting the new phraseology so as to avoid the chance of being called "insensitive". Sometimes it makes it out of academia and we end up hearing about it.
I suspect it's not obvious to the overwhelming majority of English speakers that there is some problem with referring to females as females, or describing them as female.
In my observation, claiming that using the word "female" to refer to females is somehow problematic is the fringe view. Not the other way around.
Well stated. And that's why the busybodies and the bullies who are constantly dictating new rules of acceptable speech for the rest of society to follow must be resisted at every turn. I will not concede one ounce of moral authority to these power-hungry bullies. It's particularly gratifying when one of them attempts to "correct" my speech in person, and I can respond to them right to their smug faces.
All: please step away from the title now. There's an interesting historical story here and no need to fill the thread with smoke.
"Enrolled in beauty school after graduation—cosmetology being one of the few fields open to women in the 1940s"
or
"At the peak of the Cold War—which was also the peak of the baby boom, an era when American women were urged to spend their lives as homemakers"
Do you understand where I'm coming from?
In today's age women can be just as offense as man can to groups who don't identify as either. Breaking a unified group even further.
All do the "Women who ..." And "Women in ..." Inititives are only causing harm by creating segregation. And in the long run fevloping separate cultures around a core topic.
We don't have to have our genders as the main focus to be "inclusive"
We simply need to be programmers.
Can you see why gender matters?
Society has changed alot. And all this setting the score right stuff is going to rip us apart. So every time we have to point out how bad somebody had it and who their operrssors were it is going just casue more division.
And in this case I think pointing anyof that out when telling this story is just a distraction from a real story that everybody could enjoy; that we had awesome people who did awesome shit that helped win a war.
I am not saying that the stories of oppression or injustice can't be told. Just when they are please don't try and hitch it to the far better time proof story. Eg if you want to wrtie a book about how some men did bad things and focus on on vile some men are you can do that. But at least advertise it as a book with intent to spread hate to parties not actually involved. That way when you write about "code breakers" without a gender being the main focus people can enjoy it without being distracted on either end of the spectrum.
It will come on off much more natural and powerful if when women were written about if they were done so in the same manner as men. Simply write the story "The code breakers ..." and readers will happily discover the identity of the actors in the book.
But then again people who like to point gender out often have other ajendas than simply waiting about something that could universally interest people.
(Typing from phone while holding baby. Sorry for spelling or grammar issues ).
Both are not mutually exclusive - you can do both.
The the entire men vs women is toxic. Every man can't be held responsible for for what some man did in the past. We are different people and not identified by our gender. The same holds tire doe women. What a man or woman does mentally really should not even be a topic. Making it one will only create sides that people are forced to join. It also brings up a bunch of questions that str not productive to society. Like which group is better ? If you answer either group you now become sexiest. It is just as bad to say women code better than men vs men code better than women. That is where every one of these gender separations of groups lead too. It is toxic and vile. And nobody should support it.
I am purly talking about about always grndeting the person ehoadr the achivment.
I also may have gone off topic a bit.
Edit. I am out and about. I probably should not try to convey this stuff from a phone while distracted. My arguments are not directe at the book. But it there was a bullseye it would still be on the board.
What remains is a meta argument that book writers and self-biographers are biased towards writing about male code writers once information get declassified. The article is not focused on that, nor does it make that claim explicit. The gender political aspects exist mostly in the tile and in that short paragraph, with a barely noticeable hint later on that the reason why code breaking made up from 90% women was that men got drafted and put on front lines while code breaking was mostly voluntarist that joined the female corp. The female dominance at code breaking stopped once the male-only draft ended.