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Public About-Face

Senator Tom Harken (D- IA) has come around to accepting civil marriage equality, according to Pam’s House Blend.

I think it took courage to admit, as he did, that he was wrong when he signed onto DOMA:

“We all grow as we get older, and we learn things and we become more sensitive to people and people’s lives,” Harkin said. “And the more I’ve looked at that, I’ve grown to think differently about how people – how we should live. And I guess I’m at the point that, you know – I’m to that point of live and let live,” Harkin said.

Amazingly enough, DOMA was 13 years ago, & while many were optimistic then that we could turn the tide, I’m not sure any of us expected how quickly we would.

You can thank Sen. Tom Harkin via his website.

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Big Guns

Sleeping the sleep of the just, Endymion is the cat we call Big Guns. Look at those big legs. (For those of you who don’t know, “guns” is slang for “muscles.”)

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New Study on Poverty & Education

Taylor said frequently textbooks in primary and secondary schools and in higher education do not address issues like poverty fully and often are reduced and oversimplified. “Far too many schools continue to endorse a curriculum of the absurd that encompasses ‘heroification’ of primarily white males, while the contributions of women and people of color appear in pop-out format in textbooks,” she said.

I wish I were even a little surprised by the results and her conclusions.

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Hoyden

The precursor of “tomboy” is hoyden, which Michele Ann Abate describes as follows:

First appearing in the late 16th Century, the term shares a similar etymology history: it also referred to rambunctions boys and men rather than girls and women. Ineed the Oxford English Dictionary provides the following definition for “hoyden”: “A rude, ignorant, or awkward fellow; a clown, a boor”. By the late 17th Century, however, this meaning shifted and the word began referring to like-minded members of the opposite sex: “A rude, or ill-bred girl (or woman): a boisterous noisy girl, a romp.” Unlike a tomboy, a hoden was more closely associated with breaching bourgeous mores than female gender roles.

She adds later:

Wen the concepts of “tomboy” make its debut during the mid-19th Century, it supplanted “hoyden.”

I think I’ve found the answer to my “what do you call a grown-up tomboy?” question: hoyden.