Gender of adjectives when no noun is defined?

Question

I've always been taught that the gender of the adjective must agree with the noun. I was speaking to a friend about 'Orange is the New Black' (Netflix series), and couldn't decide how to translate, since there is no definitive subject of the title. Searching the internet gives several different translations, but more generally, I'm curious how one decides which gender to use when there is no obvious subject (if I had to guess, I'd suggest that we'd default to the masculine adjectives).

Answer 1

You're right to default to masculine adjectives. If there's no noun, we're actually using the adjective as a noun. It would be like saying "the black." (El negro) When you don't know the gender of a noun, the default is masculine. You actually can see that in the Netflix series title itself: "Orange is the New Black."