Righteous Indignation

Never fear, ether audience, I found something to be cranky about!

I'm all for the language growing and expanding when new words come into play, or a word being repurposed when it makes sense to do so. But using words incorrectly for no good reason is not something I can condone. Specifically, the use of the noun woman instead of the adjective female is driving me to distraction.

For instance, the headline "Nancy Pelosi is First Woman Speaker of the House". Why can't she be the "First Female Speaker of the House"? It's not like woMAN is an improvement over feMALE when looking at patriarchal word derivation and associations. "First Man Nurse is Crowned Nurse of the Year" is just strange and wrong. And confusing to boot. What is going on? And why do I see this incorrect usage EVERYWHERE? Are there no editors who know nouns from adjectives anymore? Has everyone lost their minds?

And why do we still have so few women in positions of power that a woman is still a novelty? The last batch of statistics I read about percentages of women in governmental roles had us being handily beaten out by Iraq.