Nedanstående text har jag skamlöst snott från QI .
Boys Will
Be Girls
Until the
late 1400s the word 'girl' just meant a child of either sex. If you had to
differentiate between them, male children were referred to as 'knave girls' and
females were 'gay girls'.
The word
'boy' also didn't used to mean ‘boy’ in the modern sense but ‘servant’. The
word 'boy' meaning ‘young man’ probably derived from the way the 'servant'
meaning was used as a pejorative term. It doesn't occur before 1440 so before
then if you wanted to talk about a boy you called them a ‘girl’.
The ‘pink
for a girl, blue for a boy’ coding is actually the opposite of the system that
prevailed until quite recently. Until the 20th century toddlers of either sex
were normally dressed in white, but when colours were used, boys were dressed
in pink. At the turn of the 20th century, Dressmaker Magazine wrote: 'The
preferred colour to dress young boys in is pink. Blue is reserved for girls as
it is considered paler, and the more dainty of the two colours, and pink is
thought to be stronger (akin to red).' As late as 1927, Time magazine reported
that Princess Astrid of Belgium had been caught out when she gave birth to a girl,
because 'The cradle…had been optimistically outfitted in pink, the colour for
boys.'
Young boy with a whip, okänd konstnär 1840 |
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