It's just being used to coerce a clinical reading, like some sort of wildlife observer, relax. "The female builds her nest in the late summer..."
Adjectives and nouns are slippery things, and compound nouns exist besides.
FWIW, a quick corpus search of COCA[1] for `DET female VERB` [(a|the) female (eats|plays|chooses...)] yields 63 total attestations in the corpus (59 unique).
> It's just being used to coerce a clinical reading, like some sort of wildlife observer, relax. "The female builds her nest in the late summer..."
That's an abbreviation of 'the female of the species' which is essentially writing out a definition of 'woman' except for the given species, since a woman is a human and there probably generally isn't an equivalent (and if there is it won't be widely known) for most species.
Other than to humorous effect (Wodehouse was fond of it) it is redundant and not useful for describing humans. The female of the human species is called a woman, and this is widely known.
> relax
> So it's a thing that happens in English.
I don't have to like it.
Using the wrong their/they're/there is also 'a thing that happens in English', if by English we mean the words of people aiming to use it.
Sure, do you have anything to back up your intuition that this is just a shortening of one phrase? Where would you find this 'shortening' acceptable, and where would you not?
"A female will find multiple mates in spring"
"The male burrows deep into the ground in the winter and begins to hibernate"
These seem fine to me and are not strict shortenings of "The Female of the Species".
I'm apparently in a minority here, but I've only known one guy to use it as a term of address (vs. how I just used it), and he notably did it with everyone, a la "dude" (so much that "Guy" became his nickname).
Chief, on the other hand, I've only heard directed at males.
Yeah, I grew up in PA and that's pretty common there, but when talking to one person, it's usually "Hey dude" or "Hey man" (also mostly gender-agnostic)
Only that one guy would use it for one person, sometimes similar to whatchamacallit: "Guy! Whaddareya doin up there?!" "C'mon, guy! We're gonna be late!" "Any of you guys see my toolbox? Did guy take it again?" (Which guy, man? Dude, there's like ten guys here. Bro, you gotta be more specific.)
I think this is really interesting - I've heard "guys" used to address a group of mixed genders ("how are you guys?") but it sounds much more gendered when used to refer to a group ("how many guys are in there?" or even "are you looking for those guys?").
Perhaps because addressing people comes with more implications and possible angles for communication with those people. So "guys" fits the bill for one desired nuance that became more popular in culture (the "laid back" nuances the article mentions). Previous generations were a lot more formal.
I think the latter most became gender neutral because of the entry cry of the public television show “Three, Two, One Contact” in which a woman yelled “Hey You Guys” in what was clearly and inclusive manner.
It was The Electric Company and the woman was the legendary Rita Moreno. That show had an impressive ensemble cast, which included Morgan Freeman and Bill Cosby (who is not so much legendary these days as infamous).
One usage that is definitely single-sex is, one male might say to another male,
"Hi guy, how ya doin'?"
"OK, guy, let me tell you how to do this."
But he'd never say that to a female.
However, it wouldn't be that unusual to say to a whole group of women, whether one is male OR female,
"Hi guys, let's get started."