Talk:somdomite

RFV discussion: February–March 2020

This entry has survived Wiktionary's verification process (permalink).

Please do not re-nominate for verification without comprehensive reasons for doing so.

---

somdomite

One person's misspelling, and then a bunch of quotes referring to that one time he misspelled it. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 17:54, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

• Delete for nominator's reason. — SGconlaw (talk) 18:26, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

  This is a RFV, so "delete" would not usually belong here. What is sought are attesting quotations meeting WT:ATTEST, and given the nomination, the emphasis would be that they should not be mentions and they should be independent. (somdomite*50), sodomite at Google Ngram Viewer is interesting, showing that the mentions referring back to Wilde are numerous indeed. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:49, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

  Oops, must have misread the page heading. — SGconlaw (talk) 12:39, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

I wonder if this is a situation like Cablinasian or Talk:cannista, where a word was coined by and is usually invoked in the context of or in reference to a specific person, but multiple people who are independent of each other (when it comes to choosing to use it) do use it. For example, contrary to the entry's assertion that the plural is not attested, here's a book that uses (not just mentions) it in a section title, even inflecting it for number (then immediately refers to Wilde and even has a photo of the calling card):

• 1999, Andrew Prescott, Elizabeth M. Hallam, and the British Library, The British Inheritance: A Treasury of Historic Documents, page 12:

  Somdomites and Revolutionaries

  Oscar Wilde, the brilliant controversialist and playwright, […]

And here's one where the plural is used (not quoted like several other words in the sentence) in a sentence about what Queensberry must've thought about multiple people:

• 1998, The New Criterion, volume 16, issues 5-10, page 47:

  Queensberry honestly thought his son and his chum were "posing" as Somdomites—"playing silly buggers" just to wind him up. Many Britons of Wilde's background are what one might call socially homosexual: […]

And here's an iffier use of the plural, in italics (but contrasted with "gentlemen" in quotation marks), which could be argued to be a mention on that account:

• 1990, Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, page 195:

  […] by touching a nerve of homophobia within London's literary clubmen. During the decade, the clubs provided a semipublic space in which "gentlemen" might be discriminated from Somdomites, to use the Marquess of Queen sherry's spelling.

Here's a use next to "inverts", in a work that's referencing Wilde:

• 2013, Doug Kirshen, Six Weeks—The New Man and the London Theatre Season of 1895: Henry James, Henry Irving, Oscar Wilde (thesis at Brandeis University):

  He evolved to connect the antifeminist ridicule of the New Woman to the growing backlash against male homosexuals, the Somdomites and inverts.

But here's a work that uses it in the plural in reference to two American gay men, not Wilde (though clearly, from the phrasing, alluding to the calling card):

• 2004, Michigan Law Review, volume 102, issues 7-8, page 1476:

  A. Posing as Somdomites: John Lawrence and Tyron Garner

  Little is known publicly about the men whose arrest led to the most important gay civil rights decision in American history. According to the Houston attorney who handled their case at the trial court level, Mitchell Katine, "They're not out to be any more famous than they accidentally came to be."

All of these use the capitalized form, so a move seems to be necessary, but I would argue Prescott, New Criterion, and Michigan Law Review seem to attest the use of the word.

- -sche (discuss) 19:17, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

I also found one occurrence of the singular string, but not with a relevant meaning, in a work in which The Ardent Somdomite (and [the] Somdomite for short) is the name of some kind of ship/vessel, carrying cargo, which wrecked: I can't actually see the snippet in question to tell if it's italicized and referring to the ship, but I assume from the rest of the book that it is:

• 2009, Gary Indiana, The Shanghai Gesture: A Novel, page 29:

  "Then you swallow whole this convenient twaddle about the Somdomite spreading narcolepsy through the countryside." "There's really nothing convenient about narcolepsy," I yawned. "That's where you're mistaken," Smith leered sardonically.

- -sche (discuss) 19:19, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

RFV-passed Kiwima (talk) 10:59, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

I've moved the entry to the capitalized form and will copy the citations over. - -sche (discuss) 17:32, 2 March 2020 (UTC)