Adjective or Noun?

[rexbeccarox]

I find it drives me crazy when I see "atheist" used as an adjective. Like, "I'm atheist" instead of "I'm an atheist".

I'm pretty sure the word "atheist" is exclusively a noun, and "atheistic" would be the correlated adjective, but have things changed? Is "atheist" an acceptable adjective now?

It also drives me crazy when people capitalize "atheist" or "theist" in the middle of sentences without either being a part of a title, but that's a subject for another day.

Thoughts?

[robvalue]

I agree, you are correct as far as I can see.

Unfortunately lazy/incorrect use of language spreads quicker than ever before because of the internet, I guess.

How annoying the word is not only widely misunderstood but not even used correctly!

[Dystopia]

I've noticed this myself and I'm not a native speaker. I don't use atheist as an adjective unless it's a very peculiar context that demands such use. I think some people may just not be very good at knowing grammar rules.

[Alex K]

I agree completely. Should I randomly capitalize stuff, please be patient with me as it is probably my mother tongue seeping through.

[abaris]

It also drives me crazy when people capitalize "atheist" or "theist" in the middle of sentences without either being a part of a title, but that's a subject for another day.

Thoughts?

Guilty of doing it sometimes. Mostly because in German you do capitalize nouns and it's hard to kick the habit when typing quickly.

[rexbeccarox]

That's funny: I haven't noticed it from either of you, abaris and Alex. You're doing just fine

[Edwardo Piet]

It pisses me off too I feel exactly the same.

And yes, it's totally incorrect.

I saw one guy post on another forum years ago and he said "Atheism is not a religion and in fact I don't even label myself as "an atheist" I'm just atheist."

Just felt like a massive facepalm right there. Why is using incorrect usage and missing out the word 'an' less of a 'label' than using words correctly? Ugh, I think people are so scared to be 'labelled' they take it too far sometimes. I still like Dawkins' approach of embracing the words 'atheist' and 'atheism' and 'coming out' as an atheist as it is nothing to be ashamed of.

And then you've even got people who don't believe in God but don't like calling themselves atheists because the connotation pisses off religious people? Oh fuck off you're not there to cater to the emotional hypersensitivity of theists. Sigh.

You've got people who even dislike atheists and yet don't believe in God and when you say "Well you're an atheist too then..." it pisses them off? Oh for fucks sake.

/end rant.

[Strider]

"Atheist" is exclusively a noun. When I still worked in an academic environment (a community college library), we had students unable to form a complete sentence, let alone explain the difference between an adjective and a noun.

tldr; Ppl cant b bothered to fix there bad grammerz. kthnxbai

[Ben Davis]

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I find it drives me crazy when I see "atheist" used as an adjective. Like, "I'm atheist" instead of "I'm an atheist".

I'm pretty sure the word "atheist" is exclusively a noun, and "atheistic" would be the correlated adjective, but have things changed? Is "atheist" an acceptable adjective now?

It also drives me crazy when people capitalize "atheist" or "theist" in the middle of sentences without either being a part of a title, but that's a subject for another day.

Thoughts?

---

I'm guilty of this. You're correct, the adjective is 'atheistic' (e.g. 'his value-systems are atheistic') but I've used 'atheist' in its place before, when talking with theists. I've only done this to draw specific attention to the fact that 'atheist' is an almost redundant label; it's erroneously conflated with a ton of values when it doesn't tell you anything about a person other than their beliefs on one specific subject.

[Edwardo Piet]

Ah so you're one of those guys I mentioned who misses out the word "an" to try and make a point...?


*Sharpens knife*