The Vent and Rant Thread

[DixieGal]

... And always requires a trip to the hardware and/or electronics store because you need a female adapter but only have a male adapter and/or vice/versa and don't even get me started on USB connectors ....

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by Who are you?

How old are you anyway? Pretty old if lately includes books written in the 16th century...

Originally Posted by Patricia

Purcell's song, "What can we poor females do?" is 17th-century; so there's a long history of using "female" as a noun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIvWSOF5yiQ

That is interesting, but can you show a continuous use from then til now? I ask becuase without showing a use in the years between then an equally likely argument would be that the word female was used as a noun then and then stopped being used as a noun. In this case, what we are seeing now would be a shift in the usage.

[pshrynk]

I use it as a noun all the time: "The patient is a thritysix year old female admitted through the ER with delusions of being the Queen of an imaginary country."

[Nate the great]

Some time back Ebay added a new listing feature. If you are selling electronics, you can now fill out a form with spaces for CPU, model number, RAM, used/new, etc.

The problem with this feature is that many sellers have stopped adding extra information. For example, I bought a lot of 10 used Blackberries. The seller did not say that most of the devices were completely nonfunctional, nor did the seller say that no batteries or chargers were included.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by pshrynk

I use it as a noun all the time: "The patient is a thritysix year old female admitted through the ER with delusions of being the Queen of an imaginary country."

that's a purely hypothetical example, right ? just to illustrate your point ?

[pshrynk]

Hypothetically speaking...

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Some time back Ebay added a new listing feature. If you are selling electronics, you can now fill out a form with spaces for CPU, model number, RAM, used/new, etc.

The problem with this feature is that many sellers have stopped adding extra information. For example, I bought a lot of 10 used Blackberries. The seller did not say that most of the devices were completely nonfunctional, nor did the seller say that no batteries or chargers were included.

Frustrating, but you know I'm skeptical, I never trust anything on ebay...

Sorry IT didn't work out.

[Who are you?]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

That is interesting, but can you show a continuous use from then til now? I ask becuase without showing a use in the years between then an equally likely argument would be that the word female was used as a noun then and then stopped being used as a noun. In this case, what we are seeing now would be a shift in the usage.

Yes, there is continuous use from then to now, however the oldest books I checked (I didn't check very many of those) used it to describe non-human females, but from the 17th century it is also used as a synonym for woman.

I used google books search with the advanced option to limit publication date and searched for females as only the noun can be a plural with an S at the end (well, that's what you'd think at least, I did see one occurence where females was used as an adjective).

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

that's a purely hypothetical example, right ? just to illustrate your point ?

I thought you would post... "I resemble that remark.". But, I guess it was wishful thinking on my part.

BOb

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Patricia

Purcell's song, "What can we poor females do?" is 17th-century; so there's a long history of using "female" as a noun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIvWSOF5yiQ

... and Dickens uses "female" as a noun very commonly, eg:

...where the waitress, a bouncing young female of forty, ....

"Bleak House", Ch. 20.

Where did you get such a strange idea from, Nate?

[Patricia]

Jane Austen refers to "the females of the family," in Pride and Prejudice.
And Emily Brontë has this passage in Wuthering Heights: "It opened into the house, where the females were already astir."

[Patricia]

And Shakespeare uses female as a noun:

He, sir, that must marry this woman. Therefore, you
clown, abandon- which is in the vulgar leave--the society--which
in the boorish is company--of this female--which in the common is
woman- which together is: abandon the society of this female; or,
clown, thou perishest; or, to thy better understanding, diest;
or, to wit, I kill thee, make thee away, translate thy life into
death, thy liberty into bondage. I will deal in poison with thee,
or in bastinado, or in steel; I will bandy with thee in faction;
will o'er-run thee with policy; I will kill thee a hundred and
fifty ways; therefore tremble and depart.

Touchstone, in As You Like It, V, I.

Ferdinand, in Love's Labour Lost, reads this passage,

'with a child of our grandmother Eve, a
female; or, for thy more sweet understanding, a
woman. Him I, as my ever-esteemed duty pricks me on,
have sent to thee, to receive the meed of
punishment, by thy sweet grace's officer, Anthony
Dull; a man of good repute, carriage, bearing, and
estimation.'

[I,1]

[pilotbob]

OK... who has a copy of the OED... it should show you the first known use of the word as a noun in literature... right?

BOb

[Nate the great]

It's also defined as a noun in both the original paper and the Mobipocket version of Webster's 1913 Dictionary. Since I am gloriously wrong, I should probably explain what inspired me to post that rant.

That day I had come across this: "Aspergian Female". (This refers to a woman with Asperger's Syndrome). Part of the reaosn why it bothers me so is that there is a perfectly good slang term for someone with Asperger's,: Aspie. If she had used this term then she would have written "female Aspie". Instead, she tortured Asperger's into Aspergian, and I view this as a crime against the English language.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Some time back Ebay added a new listing feature. If you are selling electronics, you can now fill out a form with spaces for CPU, model number, RAM, used/new, etc.

The problem with this feature is that many sellers have stopped adding extra information. For example, I bought a lot of 10 used Blackberries. The seller did not say that most of the devices were completely nonfunctional, nor did the seller say that no batteries or chargers were included.

I need to edit this rant. It turns out that the description was there; I just couldn't see it because I use Firefox. Whatever fancy code they have built into the listings does not work in Firefox, only IE.

Stupid Ebay