Hacker News Reader

Comment by dingaling | Hacker News Reader

Headline should read 'The female cypher-breakers who...'

I do hate such abuse of language. Would the Smithsonian have written 'a man mathematician'? Of course not.

Alright, we've given you "code-breaking women" per teddyh below.

All: please step away from the title now. There's an interesting historical story here and no need to fill the thread with smoke.

This has started to crop up because the term female has taken on negative connotations. Similarly for girl. Thus woman is becoming the all-encompassing word in a way that does not parallel the male terms.

Just curious: what are negative connotations of "female"? I'm not a native speaker.

>Just curious: what are negative connotations of "female"? I'm not a native speaker.

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.

It's very subtle. "Females" is a term used for women in some of the seedier corners of the internet. It implies grouping women with female animals rather than grouping them together with men as human beings.

I have read your comment several times and still fail to find any meaning to it. Is it some sort of joke/sarcasm ?

It's completely sincere. I have seen it happen plenty of times. A quick search and perusal of the headlines backs me up. [1]

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=referring+to+women+as+females&t=ip...

Seems to be an extreme fringe position supported by a few articles from Buzzfeed, Jezebel, The Root, Reset Era, a YouTube video, and a reddit post with 7 votes. The rest of the results are about calling women "girls" which can be offensive for obvious reasons.

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."

It's generally the extreme fringe misogynist groups that use the term females almost entirely to the exclusion of "women."

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.

English is not my first language, but if I understand correctly, "woman" is often a noun and "female" is often an adjective; but the usage can be interchanged.

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.

There are people who argue that all kinds of things are demeaning or offensive. For example, some have argued that "person with disabilities" should be preferred over "disabled person" because using the word "person" first emphasizes their humanity. I heard someone claim that saying "I'm going to go home and sleep to recharge my batteries" is demeaning (to yourself!) because you're talking about yourself like a machine.

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'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.

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.

Unfortunately, an extreme fringe position from a few people with decently wide media reach can be sufficient to establish something as "offensive". Once some people have said it's offensive, people who are more concerned with respectability will probably avoid saying it, which means the people left saying it will, relatively speaking, be less concerned with respectability, and therefore will try less and probably succeed less at being seen as respectable; the word will therefore acquire less respectable connotations due to who uses it, which will provide a stronger motivator for respectability-concerned people to avoid it, and thus the statement "that word is offensive" becomes a self-fulfilling proclamation. I believe a recent, strong example of this was when some people with very wide media reach announced that Pepe the frog was a white nationalist symbol.

>Unfortunately, an extreme fringe position from a few people with decently wide media reach can be sufficient to establish something as "offensive". Once some people have said it's offensive, people who are more concerned with respectability will probably avoid saying it, which means the people left saying it will, relatively speaking, be less concerned with respectability, and therefore will try less and probably succeed less at being seen as respectable; the word will therefore acquire less respectable connotations due to who uses it, which will provide a stronger motivator for respectability-concerned people to avoid it, and thus the statement "that word is offensive" becomes a self-fulfilling proclamation. I believe a recent, strong example of this was when some people with very wide media reach announced that Pepe the frog was a white nationalist symbol.

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.

This seems to be an interesting case, where using "female(s)" as a noun is the usage that some people have objected to, and now this spills over into people avoiding the usage of "female" as an adjective. Well, I suppose that kind of evolution is par for the course with any word that ends up getting deemed offensive.

Then why not simply write “The code-breaking women who…”? There’s no need to abuse the language pointlessly.

I'm not English native speaker, why is it abuse? There is also book "Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II" that uses the same term.

"Female" is an adjective and "women" is a noun.

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.

The terms aren't perfectly symmetric and interchangeable so the Smithsonian is doing the sensible thing to avoid making it sound like they're talking about some species of fish.

It's a problem of the english language. But it's stupid nonetheless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com