Talk:male prostitute

male prostitute
tagged but not listed -- Liliana • 12:26, 31 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Keep, I think. alone so strongly implies "female" that  gets as many (distinct, relevant) hits as , even though the context should make the "male" completely superfluous — and even though, in a few cases, "child prostitute" would have been more pointed. With  and  the picture seems to be similar; there are too many hits for me to want to go through them all individually and pick out the irrelevant hits and duplicates, but my impression is that the latter has, at most, 25–50% more distinct, relevant hits than the former, even though you'd expect the former to be so redundant as to be vanishingly rare. (Incidentally, there's also a slight meaning difference, in that some of the hits for "he was a prostitute" mean a metaphorical prostitute — "The pure physicist wouldn't talk to the ceramics engineer because he was a prostitute who was applying physics" — whereas "male prostitute" seems always to be literal, or at least less metaphorical.) —Ruakh TALK 12:46, 31 July 2011 (UTC) Striking my "keep" per my 20:05, 2 August comment: "maybe this is really information about ". —Ruakh TALK 17:18, 9 August 2011 (UTC)


 * And this presumably goes without saying, but replacing "he" with "she" and/or "male" with "female" does not display the above pattern. "Female prostitute" is vanishingly rare; in fact, "he was|became a female prostitute" each get as many distinct, relevant hits as their counterparts with "she": zero and one, respectively. —Ruakh TALK 12:51, 31 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Keep per Ruakh, I think. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:00, 1 August 2011 (UTC)


 * So you (Ruakh) are saying it's a common collocation. I don't dispute that (and would be brave or foolish to try, in the face of your numbers). However: It's utterly simple to decipher as the sum of its parts. It has no connotation AFAICT other than that supplied by those parts. Delete. &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 19:02, 2 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, I'm not exactly saying that it's a common collocation; it certainly is, but had I wanted to say that, I would simply have linked to . Instead I linked to searches that produce many fewer hits, but that more effectively demonstrate the phrase's odd linguistic properties. But maybe this is really information about . All three of our senses say, "A person who ", but the first, and maybe also the second, should instead probably say, "A woman, or other person, who ". (A usage note is probably necessary as well.) —Ruakh TALK 20:05, 2 August 2011 (UTC)


 * If prostitute means "a woman who " then a male prostitute is not "a male women who " Mglovesfun (talk) 11:21, 6 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Yes, clearly; but I'm afraid I don't see what you're getting at . . . —Ruakh TALK 19:40, 8 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete. 3 of 4 US unabridged dictionaries have a sense of prostitute that is specific to men. All 3 explicitly mention homosexual activity in that definition. We need that sense.
 * Even without that sense, it is hardly unusual for a class of referents that differs from the typical referent in an attribute, even a defining attribute, to have a modifier that so indicates. DCDuring TALK 13:10, 6 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete and handle via usage note at [[prostitute]]. Setting CFI aside, a usage note at [[prostitute]] seems more likely than an entry for [[male prostitute]] to help readers understand that the term is mostly applied to women. - -sche (discuss) 20:31, 6 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I've made the sense changes at [[prostitute]] that I described above, and added a usage note; please take a look. —Ruakh TALK 17:36, 9 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Looks good, and delete [[male prostitute]]. You might want to make a similar note at [[nurse]]; I notice that "he became a male nurse" gets twice as many b.g.c. hits as "he became a male prostitute" does (although only 1/8 as many as "he became a nurse"). (Out of curiosity, I also searched for "He became a (male) midwife", and got zero hits with "male" and 6 distinct hits without it, of which only one is using midwife literally rather than figuratively.) —Angr 17:45, 9 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I think I'll wait a few days for feedback on this one before making a similar change to [[nurse]]. That one seems potentially trickier, because the history is so different. —Ruakh TALK 17:57, 9 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete. Is it time yet? · 20:35, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

deleted -- Liliana • 22:34, 23 September 2011 (UTC)