89
votes
Accepted
The meaning of "half woman, half girl"
The text has nothing to do with whether she has a spouse or boyfriend. She's referring to back to a past time when she was a youth, which is a noun meaning "a young person between adolescence and ...
- 12.2k
72
votes
Accepted
Can "he" and "man" refer to all genders?
You are opening a "can of worms!" This is a topic that can cause strong emotions.
It is also not a matter of grammar, but a matter of style.
English doesn't have a pronoun that singular, non-neuter ...
- 232k
40
votes
Can "he" and "man" refer to all genders?
Leaving aside current views on gender identity, historically, "man" has been used as an umbrella term for both genders - and it still is, unless someone objects to it. "Mankind" refers to all human ...
- 111k
37
votes
Accepted
How to deal with unknown genders in English?
If you want to sound formal and don't want to be accused of any kind of sexism or if you really don't know the gender of the person you're talking about, I'd recommend using the pattern him or her. It ...
- 37.7k
35
votes
Accepted
When the Gentle Giant song "Black Cat" refers to a cat as "she", does that mean the cat is female?
In English, there is no grammatical gender that is different from biological gender.
However, there is a tradition in what you call 'folk language' of referring to unknown cats as female and unknown ...
- 61.4k
33
votes
Accepted
The female equivalent of "don't break my balls"
I'm not sure there's a direct female equivalent, but there's a gender-neutral expression with a similar meaning and level of vulgarity:
Get off my ass!
That being said, I think it's much more ...
- 1,807
32
votes
The meaning of "half woman, half girl"
"Half woman" and "half girl" are not idioms or anything. She's trying to evoke a more literal meaning, using this "half X, half Y" construction similarly to how you could describe a mule as "half ...
- 1,118
30
votes
When the Gentle Giant song "Black Cat" refers to a cat as "she", does that mean the cat is female?
This cat is 100% a female.
There are no arbitrarily gendered nouns in English. The personal pronouns "he/she/him/her..." are only used when referring to nouns that are gendered by definition,...
- 51.1k
28
votes
How to address a woman in a letter?
Use Ms., not Ms./Miss
The "Ms." abbreviation was created in large part to avoid the awkwardness of using Mrs./Miss.
I can't speak for all of the English-speaking world, but, in the U.S., Ms. has ...
J.R.♦
- 110k
25
votes
Female Devil (and other -ess problems)
Gender isn't as big a feature of English as it is of German. Devil isn't a word with gender, though forms like she-devil or devil woman might be used to counter the default gender assumption among ...
- 43.2k
22
votes
When referring to a gender-neutral entity in a paper such as an "agent", what pronouns and conjugation style should I use nowadays?
APA and others support singular 'they' for cases where gender is "unknown or irrelevant to the context of the usage".
Arguments that this usage is broadly incorrect seem to be outdated in ...
- 478
21
votes
Accepted
Female Devil (and other -ess problems)
‘devil’ (with a lowercase ‘d’, with a capital ‘D’ it’s usually a proper name with a specific associated gender) is not inherently gendered in English. It’s often implicitly masculine for cultural ...
- 4,248
18
votes
Why sister [nouns] and not brother [nouns]?
The Oxford English Dictionary shows that this usage goes back to at least the 1500s. It provides the following definition:
Appositive, with the sense ‘fellow’, ‘having a close kinship or ...
- 23.2k
17
votes
The female equivalent of "don't break my balls"
There are a lot of other options that don't refer to specific body parts, but I gather that you want something similarly vulgar but referring to female anatomy. It's not all that common, but if you ...
- 88.5k
17
votes
When the Gentle Giant song "Black Cat" refers to a cat as "she", does that mean the cat is female?
Animals are routinely referred to as "it" if their sex is unknown or the author chooses not to mention it. If this writer has chosen to use "her", it's an explicit indication that ...
- 178
14
votes
Can "he" and "man" refer to all genders?
Rather than "can these words refer to all genders" I'd propose to think of it as "are there texts in which these words refer to all genders", to which the answer is an emphatic "yes". It was long the ...
- 2,096
13
votes
Why sister [nouns] and not brother [nouns]?
In describing relations between entities as if they were relations between people, you are personifying those entities. "Sister", "mother", and "daughter" are common ...
- 1,287
12
votes
The meaning of "half woman, half girl"
Briefly, "half girl, half woman" practically equals Britney Spears' "not a girl, not yet a woman" which means that she has almost grown out of her childhood and she is no more a girl, but she hasn't ...
- 25.1k
12
votes
Can "he" and "man" refer to all genders?
"Man", yes. "He", no - but "him" and "his", yes.
From a historical perspective, this is because "man" was a originally gender-neutral word meaning "person" or "human" (incidentally, "human" comes ...
- 484
12
votes
Female Devil (and other -ess problems)
I know this answer does not focus on whether one should write "female devil", "she-devil" or "demoness", but as I understand it, the OP was also interested in knowing ...
- 28.9k
10
votes
Accepted
Is "singular they" widely used?
Is singular they widely accepted in English speaking countries such as America and Britain?
In the 19th century, singular they became stigmatized. It wasn't until the 1960s that this began to ...
- 15.9k
8
votes
Accepted
Can "Am I the bad guy here?" be said by a girl?
Bad guy is an idiom most common in film but used for any fiction to describe the villain of any sex of a story. "In 101 Dalmations, the bad guy is called Cruella de Vil. In Duel, the bad guy is ...
- 7,603
8
votes
Using "her" to refer to the word "child"
This is an example of the very common problem of how to refer to people of unknown or irrelevant sex. Native speakers disagree, often very strongly, about the best way to deal with this. Many native ...
- 7,603
8
votes
Can "he" and "man" refer to all genders?
Consider the US constitution. It uses "he" and "his" for Senators and the President, and meant men only. At the time, women weren't allowed to hold office -- they weren't allow to ...
- 1,842
8
votes
Accepted
Is using gender-specific language when talking about inanimate things can be wrong in any sense?
Yes, these are all correct as metaphors.
"Ancestor" (or descendent) implies that newer version was developed from the older one in some way. "Brother" (or "sister" or "sibling") suggests that one ...
- 232k
7
votes
The female equivalent of "don't break my balls"
I've heard
Get off me!
pretty regularly. Also
Don't get your panties in a bind!
from women as well as from men. Probably not exactly what you're looking for but fun all the same. You could ...
- 179
7
votes
Accepted
Personal pronoun (when the sex is unspecified)
There are lots of opinions about how to refer to a single individual of unspecified sex.
When people sat down to write formal grammars of the English language (in the 18th and 19th centuries, if ...
- 22.9k
6
votes
Accepted
How do I translate this sentence and keep the translation free of any reference to the person's gender?
Their is the pronoun you're looking for.
The user prefers to keep their identity protected.
They isn't necessary a plural pronoun. It could also be used as singular, meaning he/she.
Singular they ...
- 300
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible