this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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"the suspect is a six foot, white male"
Sounds fine to me
"I was just visiting my friend, a six foot white male"
A little weirder. Context is everything.
Well yeah, why would I need a description of your friend unless it pertains to an upcoming story, and why not use his name if you know it? The cop can't usually say "It was Steve what done it" because most places aren't Mayberry.
I think that's because the descriptors come after the noun in reporting. Similar to how documentation is done for other professions, like healthcare. If it's out of the context of reporting, or other situations listed in the site below, it sounds grammatically strange or rude.
https://myenglishgrammar.com/lessons/adjectives-function-as-nouns/
Source: I'm in healthcare.
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No they don’t. The word “male” is the noun here.
Why did people upvote that?
Because it's still acting as a descriptor rather than an identifier, despite playing the syntactic role of a noun instead of an adjective. It's more about semantics in this case than syntax.
No it is playing the syntactic role of a noun. An object is a noun.
I know it's playing the syntactic role of a noun, that's what I said. But it's playing the semantic role of a descriptor. The "thing" being described here is a suspect, one that is white and also male, as opposed to a male who is white and also suspected.
Syntactically, the word male was a noun. But semantically, it's still just describing the suspect, rather than identifying the thing to be described.
"Suspect" is the noun
Both are nouns. Suspect is the subject, male is the object. You could replace it with, for example "the suspect is a cat", and I think we can all agree "cat" is a noun. "six foot" and "white" are the adjectives in that sentence.
Both are nouns there. Suspect is the subject.
So you don’t think this argument would hold up if they said “Police are searching for a six foot white male”?
Because the police never try to dehumanize "suspects" and "perpetrators".
Cops (ACAB) are not a good example for moral treatment of others.
Besides, this is basically jargon. That has its own set of rules.