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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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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.