I cringe every time I hear another guy refer to women like this
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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I don't think that's true unless you mean within the context of referring to people or something, e.g. the blacks, the poors. But then stuff like "the rich" and "the unemployed" I don't really take issue with.
yeah, you're right but they're two different cases. notice how when it's right you don't pluralize it with an -s because some adjectives have a form of a plural noun, so they don't have a singular form: "a poor" or "a black" is just yikes. you can find words like "rich" as plural nouns apart from the adjective forms in the dictionary. you might find "female" and "black" as a noun for people too, but they should be marked offensive either directly or in usage notes.
so that's the distinction. "black" or "female" don't exist as plural nouns like "the rich" or "the blessed".
interestingly enough there are exceptions. there is no plural noun "the gay" but "gays" usually isn't offensive as a noun, but also "a gay" is weird and offensive. language is complicated.
I believe "the gays" used to be offensive, and I did notice that myself but it doesn't make sense to met that that would be the distinction!
i just suggested it as a shorthand. the actual distinction is whether the word is generally used as a noun as well as adjective, and when it is, usually it's used as a plural noun.
it makes sense because plural nouns usually are a quick way to refer to a section of a population that share an aspect. but using an adjective as a singular noun has the connotation of reducing someone to that one aspect of them, which is the adjective. and so using an adjective as a noun with an -s pluralization implies there's also a singular form which is usually offensive.
language is fluid and it evolves, so nothing here is a hard rule and there will be exceptions, and things might change with time. this is mostly based on observation and convention.
I'm not convinced that there's even a soft rule; I think it's just a case of the one or the other way of doing it nebulously sticking, like how sometimes you form a noun with -ness and sometimes you do it with -hood. Which now I think about it is more or less what you're saying, but I don't think it's done consciously at any rate.
language conventions are rarely conscious. they just happen. every now and then there's a campaign for our against using certain words or phrases; sometimes they stick and sometimes they don't. but those are conscious i guess. mostly though it just happens organically.
like a perfectly normal word becomes vulgar in time if enough people just say it a certain way. it's not like people suddenly hold a meeting and decide this word is bad now. it just starts to feel like it after a while, so it eventually becomes so.