Talk:bædling

David Clark's 2009 Between Medieval Men has an extended discussion of this word, "The key question [...] is what the term bædling means, and we are largely dependent on informed guesswork, since it appears only four times in the extant literature, in two glossaries and two penitential texts [...]. The Dictionary of Old English defines it cautiously as '? effeminate man ? homosexual', [...] In both glosses, the word seems to have associations of effeminacy, and these associations are supplemented by the probably cognate noun bæddel 'hermaphrodite', which again appears only twice in a glossary." Clark goes on to discuss the uncertainty of whether the word refers to a kind of male, or to "some indeterminate gender" like bæddel ("hermaphrodite"), and (in footnotes) to discuss etymological hypotheses. - -sche (discuss) 04:29, 13 December 2020 (UTC)