I only have two dictionaries, but both have male and female as both adjectives and nouns. In what dictionary are you seeing them only as adjectives?
Even dictionary.com has “noun: a male person” and “noun: a female person”, which goes directly against both your grammar point and your livestock point.
Hopefully you’re just a linguistic prescriptivist with a preferred dictionary that doesn’t match mine. But I suspect you just pulled all of that out of your ass while trying to sound pretentious because you wanted to feel like the smartest person in the room.
That said, as a descriptivist, I accept that those words (as nouns or otherwise) are changing to sometimes be derogatory, so I try not to use them to describe people, just to avoid my intentions being misunderstood.
Just a thoughtless prescriptivist, repeating what I’d understood from previous such discussions, without having done my own due diligence. 🤷 I stand corrected.
I only have two dictionaries, but both have male and female as both adjectives and nouns. In what dictionary are you seeing them only as adjectives?
Even dictionary.com has “noun: a male person” and “noun: a female person”, which goes directly against both your grammar point and your livestock point.
Hopefully you’re just a linguistic prescriptivist with a preferred dictionary that doesn’t match mine. But I suspect you just pulled all of that out of your ass while trying to sound pretentious because you wanted to feel like the smartest person in the room.
That said, as a descriptivist, I accept that those words (as nouns or otherwise) are changing to sometimes be derogatory, so I try not to use them to describe people, just to avoid my intentions being misunderstood.
Just a thoughtless prescriptivist, repeating what I’d understood from previous such discussions, without having done my own due diligence. 🤷 I stand corrected.
Glad my suspicion was wrong, sorry for the rude comment!