Talk:tomboy

From RFV

tomboy

For the sense of an emasculant woman - is emasculant English? Jonathan Webley 17:06, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

No b.g.c. hits in English (though there are hits in Latin and French). Not in OED2+, even in the full text, although there is an adjectival use of emasculate meaning emasculated. If emasculant did exist in English, I would expect it to be a synonym of emasculate, or perhaps being emasculated, which would seem to be antonyms to what the editor intended. --Enginear 23:25, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

It would mean "emasculating" or "tending to emasculate", I'd think. Whether that's a legitimate sense of tomboy is a separate question. -dmh 08:45, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Have now checked OED2+ for tomboy. They don't mention any of the senses either of us suggested. --Enginear 15:03, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Suggestive, but not definitive. Cites, anyone? -dmh 21:28, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps the contributor just meant a masculine woman? The top def is for a girl, so maybe this was just an attempt to say it also applies to adult female humans (although whether this deserves a separate def is questionable.) --Jeffqyzt 21:20, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

I would assume it's a confusion over the existance of the word effeminate - the contributor probably assumed emasculate was the opposite. Ending a word with the suffix -ant instead of -ate seems to be a common error (for example, I've seen people talking about "A Series of Unfortunant Events" before). RobbieG 20:31, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

RFV failed. Sense deleted. —Ruakh_TALK 09:36, 23 May 2007 (UTC)