实用英语口语：“假小子”怎么说
Reader question:In this quote – "Pierce has always been interested in women dressed as men,
because, she says, that's how she grew up - a tomboy swinging from trees." –
what does "tomboy" mean?
My comments:
Tom is a boy. Tomboy is a girl – a girl who behaves like a boy. As
explained in the example above, she wears boy's clothes and swings from
trees.
Tom is a boy's name, hence the term – tomboy is a girl who acts like a Tom,
or Tommy, or Thomas. According to Longman, tomboy is "a girl who likes playing
the same games as boys". Wordnet.princeton.edu gives an equally curt answer: "a
girl who behaves in a boyish manner". A search through Wikipedia, however, the
most reliable unreliable sources for reference ever created, finds that the term
has been around a long time, actually dating back to the 1500s. At first,
according to Wiki, tomboy was a boy, a "rude, boisterous boy," as a matter of
fact. Nowadays girls have this term completely for themselves – probably for
lack of a better word. No, don't get me wrong. Tomboy is not a bad word – girls
don't have to be particularly rude, either, to acquire that distinction.
The English language is explanatory. Usually when you see a new word in a
sentence, you'll also see it "explained" in some similar descriptions in the
following sentences, giving you a chance to correlate them and get their
meaning. Whenever a young woman is described as a tomboy, her tomboyish behavior
is usually explained right away. For example: "My mother grew up a tomboy. She
had short frizzy hair and an expression that would leave you running home to
your momma."
Or: I grew up a tomboy. I'm 17 now, and I wear girly stuff, but I still
have my tomboyish traits. I like spending lots of time outside.
Finally, this from the Toronto Star:
Cameron Diaz claims to have always been a tomboy. That's how she explains
her tendency to go braless, in case you were dying to know. Britney Spears,
Charlize Theron, Hilary Swank, Michelle Pfeiffer, Keri Russell and Keira
Knightley all say they have, or had, a whole lot of tomboy in them.
It's chic in these post-feminist times for beautiful female stars to admit
to a certain "maleness." Ordinary women, too, now often wear a tomboy childhood,
once tinged with varying degrees of anxiety (why can I not find it within myself
to be a dainty princess? will my daughter grow up to be a lesbian?) like a badge
of honour.
But the word "tomboy," with its basis in "essentialist" thinking about
gender – girls are like this, boys are like that, and those who cross the line
aren't quite normal – doesn't sit well with some people.
In a recent Oscar-related cover spread in The New York Times Magazine,
writer Lynn Hirschberg described the now 21-year-old cover girl Ellen Page, star
of the hit movie Juno, as "a tomboy – her on-screen persona is sharp,
clear-eyed, determined and self-consciously original."
The following week, the magazine ran a letter from Barbara Schechter,
director of the graduate program in child development at Sarah Lawrence College
in Bronxville, N.Y., commenting on the writer's use of the term.
"It is unfortunate that we have no other word available to describe this
strong, independent young woman than to refer to her as a tomboy. This continues
to convey to girls that growing up clear-eyed and courageous is being like a
boy."
Interestingly, tomboy was first used in the mid-16th century for males,
denoting "a rude, boisterous, or forward boy," according to the Oxford English
Dictionary. By then, because Thomas had been a popular name for centuries, "Tom"
was a long-established moniker for the common man (hence tomfoolery).
By 1579, tomboy had somehow switched genders and referred, according to the
OED, to "a bold or immodest woman." The word came into its current meaning – "a
girl who behaves like a spirited or boisterous boy"– by 1592.
In a telephone interview, Schechter said the tomboy issue isn't as hot as
it was a couple of decades ago "because in some ways we've made a lot of
progress, and there are a lot more roles and opportunities available to
girls.
"In fact, the article in the Times attests to that; it really was
suggesting that there were these new female role models that are being embodied
in these films. And therefore I think it was all the more disappointing that
they referred to Ellen Page as a tomboy, because in a way it was sort of
retro... I thought that maybe we'd moved beyond that."
Schechter notes that when she told a friend about her letter to the Times,
the friend dismissed Schechter's concerns, arguing that "tomboy" is just a
"manner of speaking." But Schechter counters that academics – especially at a
very liberal campus like Sarah Lawrence – can be out of touch with what's going
on in the real world, where children "get very invested in the categories of
gender as being dualistic and dichotomous, and children get very invested in
boys not being like girls and girls not being like boys."
"I have a relative who's a psychiatrist, a woman, and she recently referred
to her seven-year-old daughter as a tomboy, and I was shocked, and I really
called her on it at another time. Because I think especially telling a girl that
she's a tomboy suggests that there's something wrong with that behaviour and
that she will need to outgrow it... if (she) wants to be a normal girl."
...
- Why 'tomboy' remains a loaded word, March 2, 2008.
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