What is the reasoning for this? Not following what is "wrong" in the original.
Worth noting is that there is no equivalent term to "female" when referring to men, who are almost always referred to as "men." This is because there is an underlying cultural assumption that men are the default and women are the exception. While the use of the word "female" to describe a woman is not inherently wrong, using the term "woman" is more accurate and respectful, and nobody would use the term "male" to describe a man in the same way.
“Male” is the word, and it is used in lots of books in exactly the same way as it’s being used here.
I have read tons of books that said something along the lines of “he was an excellent male specimen” or “a member of the male species”
Using the word female/male has a specific effect on the way the sentence reads, it gives it a clinical feel and is very useful. Rewriting usages to the approved, politically correct, version just smacks of 1984 style newspeak.
If someone is a fan of “female” as a noun: I’m not going to change your mind. I get that changing language is annoying sometimes. I’m pointing out that “female” as a noun does bother some people, “woman” only bothers people if they know it’s been changed and see it as bowing to PC pressure. Since most people don’t check the diffs from one edition to another when buying books, this is a really easy decision on the part of the publisher, who just wants to quietly make money for the most part.
Seems like there is an effort to intentionally keep making it more complex to show who really keeps up with twitter the most.
I’d hope that most people would give the benefit of the doubt people who aren’t native English speakers, though.
That phrasing (in particular "does" vs. "only") makes it sound like being bothered by the first thing is inherently justified but being bothered by the second thing isn't. And why do you specify the condition that will cause the second thing to bother the people but leave it ambiguous for the first thing?
I don't understand it. Respectfully, I also find it mildly amusing.
I don’t think describing the conditional thing as conditional implies any judgement.
The noun sense of female well precedes (going back to its Latin roots) the adjectival sense of the word. [1] The adjectival sense came from the noun, the exact reverse of what you are saying.
And this pattern of adjectives coming from nouns (e.g. leafy, greasy, beautiful, harmful, dangerous, adventurous) is common, while the reverse is not (I'm hard put to think of even one example). So what you are saying here is a nonsense, with no scholarly basis to it.
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/female#etymonline_v_5841
I also would not change the words of a dead author to reflect modern usage because I enjoy stepping into a the past and seeing how people used to write. Plus there is the alliteration, which is really the clincher here: those who edited this are philistines.
(Not throwing anything at you, webjunkie. You merely explained the change without opining on it. Just commenting in general.)
The right example would be "He was a boisterous male."
Which is okay, to me it is OK if these books are not read. There are enough other books. But, people selling them will want then to sound like people talk today.
Fixed it for you.