“假小子”怎么说_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

“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."