Anytime I hear a guy say females out of context I think of the ferengi.
I use female a bit when discussing anatomy, but that's the correct use imo. Eg, the female pelvis has a bigger hole in the floor for child birth, which is probably true of most mammals that have vaginal births.
I don't think it was stolen, it's just sloppy workmanship. Some guy on the assembly line bunged everything together haphazardly, and at the end had an extra | left over and just shrugged and sent it out anyway. You should probably be grateful, some further down the assembly line got a whole bunch of extra X's when he decided to whack a bunch of those leftover |'s together to get rid of them.