2020-09-25 ศัพท์ ที่มักสับสน ชุด F – female

Revision F

2020-09-25

ศัพท์ ที่มักสับสนในการใช้ ชุด F – female

การใช้ภาษาอังกฤษ ที่ถือว่า ถูกต้อง ในที่นี้ เป็นไป ตามมาตรฐาน ของภาษา

การใช้ภาษาอังกฤษ ไม่กำหนดมาตฐาน ถือตามส่วนใหญ่ที่ใช้แต่ละท้องถิ่น

ความหมาย อาจยืดหยุ่น ขึ้นอยู่กับ ตำแหน่ง/หน้าที่ ในประโยค

Dictionary.com

ออกเสียง “Female” = ‘FEE-meyl’

Dictionary.com

SYNONYM STUDY FOR FEMALE

See woman.

Female, feminine, effeminate are adjectives

that describe women and girls or attributes and conduct culturally ascribed to them.

Female, which is applied toplants and animals as well as to human beings,

is a biological or physiological descriptor, classifyingindividuals on the basis of their potential or actual ability to produceoffspring in bisexual reproduction.

It contrasts with male in all uses: her oldest female relative; the female parts of the flower.

Feminine refers essentially to qualities or behaviors deemed by a culture or society to be especially appropriate to or ideally associated with women and girls.

In American and Western European culture, these have traditionally included features such as delicacy, gentleness, gracefulness, and patience: to dance with feminine grace; a feminine sensitivity to moods.

Feminine is also, less frequently, used to refer to physical features: a lovely feminine figure; small, feminine hands.

Effeminate is most often applied derogatorily to men or boys, suggesting that they have character or behavior traits culturally believed to be appropriate to women and girls rather than to men: an effeminate horror of rough play; an effeminate speaking style. See also womanly.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Did You Know?

In the 14th century, female appeared inEnglish with such spellings as femel, femelle, and female. The word comes from the Latin femella, meaning “young woman, girl,” which in turn is based on femina, meaning “woman.” In English, the similarity in form and sound between the words female and male led people to useonly the female spelling. This closeness also led to the belief that female comes from or is somehow related to male. However, apart from the influence of male on the modern spelling of female, there is no linkbetween the origins of the two words.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Using 'Lady,' 'Woman,' and 'Female' to Modify Nouns

'Female' doctor? 'Lady' lawyer? 'Woman' politician? Are any of these not offensive?

Here at Merriam-Webster, we have a number of women editors. Or is it female editors? Certainly not lady editors, right?

There's currently a split between the use of 'woman' and 'female' as modifiers, with some preferring one over the other. If you're stuck, consider that there's rarely a need to say something like 'female surgeon'; most of the time, 'surgeon' works just fine.

Gendered modifiers like female, woman, and lady are a thorny issue in English usage. All three words began life as nouns, with woman and lady showing up very early in the language, and female showing up in the 1300s. Lady was used initially as a form of address for a woman who had run of a household or who had charge over servants, and late came to refer to a woman who held a high rank. Woman has retained its original meaning, which is now almost 1400 years old: “an adult female human being.” Female first referred to a woman or girl, but within about a hundred years of its appearance, it was also being used of animals (“Byrdes that ben femalles may not abyde there,” —The Myrrour of the Worlde, 1481). Unlike lady and woman, however, female is also a full-fledged adjective, and the adjectival use has historically been more clinical and biological than not (as in, “the female plant” or Alexander Pope’s “goats of female kind”). There was remarkably little fussing over any of these words. Until the end of the 1800s, that is.

The arguments began with the bare nouns: was it appropriate to call a group of women females? Are all women ladies? Can you call a group of female human beings of various ages females or should you go with ladies or women? Though advice varied, it was generally agreed by the beginning of the 20th century that female was a disparaging term as it made no differentiation between humans and animals (this in spite of the fact that female was, in previous centuries, actually preferred to woman and lady); lady was a fine and polite word to describe a woman of excellentsocial refinement or breeding (in spite of the fact that it was, at that point in time, often used in informal print and speech to refer specifically to women who happened to have jobs that would benefitfrom being tagged as above their station, as with cleaning lady and saleslady); and woman was the preferred term to refer to an adult woman (which had always been the case).

All three nouns had been used attributively (that is, before a noun in order to modify it) before—woman, in fact, had been used attributively back to the 14th century. Newspapers from the 1800s are surprisingly populated with lady doctors, female lawyers, and women scientists. And these uses went largely unremarked upon until the 20th century.

The first scholar to critically examine the attributive uses of female, woman, and lady was Henry Fowler, author of the 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage, and while his conclusions are commonsensical, his manner of expressing himself grates. In a section called “Feminine designations,” he claims that women who argue against the use of gendered words ending in -ess, like authoress and poetress, are being, in short, whiny and illogical, and that since the English language is flexible enough to allow these designations, we had better let it. There is one interesting note in his jeremiad, however:

With the coming extension of women’s vocations, feminine vocation-words are a special need of the future; everyone knows the inconvenience of being uncertain whether a doctor is a man or a woman;...

For all his late Victorian bluster, Fowler was prescient in one regard: most of our current uses of gendered modifiers are vocation-related(lady doctor, woman senator, female restaurateur). And he has some usage guidance on that score. Regarding lady, he writes:

Lady prefixed to names of vocations as a mark of sex (lady doctor, author, clerk, &c.) is a cumbrous substitution for a feminine designation, which should be preferred when it exists or can be made; in default of that, woman or female would be better than lady...

But Fowler had some further thoughts on female and woman. After noting that the noun female had become “reasonably resented” as mostly a biological designation, he goes on to say that

It is not reasonable to extend this resentment to the adjective use of female; but it is the mistaken extension which probably accounts for the apparent avoidance of the natural phrase female suffrage & the use of the clumsy woman suffrage instead.

His preference for female over woman seems to be grammatical in nature: he notes that shoehorning woman (a noun) into an adjective’s role is “mere perversity” when there’s a perfectly good adjective to use instead: female.

Fowler set the tone for the conversation that would take off in the latter part of the 20th century. Linguists and scholars who studied gendered language have, over decades, formulated the general rulewe currently function under. Lady as a modifier is disparaging at best and should be avoided:

When choosing between female and woman as modifiers, the usage advice is split. Some advocate for woman:

Although it is generally preferable to use woman or women as adjectives...

but allow that female is also an adequate choice:

but the animal connotation of female can be hard to shake for some:

Female connotes a biological category. ... I avoid female in my own writing because it feels disrespectful, as if I'm treating the people I'm referring to as mammals but not humans. —Deborah Tannen, quoted in The New York Times Magazine, 18 Mar. 2007

So while all agree that lady as a modifier is right out—though we do still see the modifier lady in current English prose—there’s currently a split between the use of woman and female as modifiers, with some preferring one over the other. And yet, for all the confusion, there is better advice out there:

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language

fe′male′ness n.

Usage Note: Perhaps because the use of female to modify a noun for a professional, as in female doctor, can seem derogatory if it seems to imply that professionals are male by default, some writers use woman or women as modifiers when identifying the sex of the referent is necessary. Despite this tendency, in our 2016 survey, overwhelming majorities of the Usage Panel (97 percent) found the use of both female and male to be acceptable in the sentences This