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 ^^
No they don’t. The word “male” is the noun here.
Why did people upvote that?
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.
No it is playing the syntactic role of a noun. An object is a noun.
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.
“Suspect” is the noun
Both are nouns there. Suspect is the subject.
So you don’t think this argument would hold up if they said “Police are searching for a six foot white male”?