Friday, September 7, 2007

Euro Bikini Girls 053





Etymology

The word "girl" first appears during the Middle Ages. The Anglo-Saxon word gyrela = "ornament" may have given rise to the modern pronunciation of "girl", if the change in meaning can be explained. Alternatively, it could have come from the Old Low German word kerl, which would have been consistent with its original meaning. While there is no general agreement about the etymology of "girl", it is found in manuscripts dating from 1290 with the meaning "a child" (of either sex). A female child was called a "gay girl"; a male child was called a "knave girl". Like many other words that originally were not gender-specific, "girl" gradually came to be used primarily and then exclusively for one sex. There are manuscripts dating from 1530 in which the word "girl" is used to mean "maiden" (also originally applied to both sexes), or any unmarried female. Within little more than a century, however, the word began to take on implications of social class. In 1668, in his Diary, Samuel Pepys uses the word to mean a female servant of any age: "girl" = "serving girl". Note the parallel shift in the meaning of the word "maid".


Source from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki


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