"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 09/11/17 (tomboy, tom cat, waghalter)

We are with Tom Adams. He e-mailed in and said, why is a boyish girl called a tomboy?  In other words, is there any reason why Tom is the name used to describe masculine qualities, if you like. And you find it in tom cat as well, so he was wondering about that. So I looked in the Oxford English Dictionary and the first mentioned of tomboy is from a comedy performed in 1556, so we going back a long way. And the quotation is, "Is all your delight and joy in whisking and ramping abroad like a tomboy?" But there were no girls in the offing here. This was said to a boy, so the tomboy was in fact male, rather than female. And that's because the original meaning of the word was of a rude, boisterious boy or a rapscallion. Or indeed a waghalter. A waghalter was a mischievous joker, so mischievous that in the grim humour of the times, he was thought to be fit for the gallows ans that's actually where we get wag today for a comedian. Going back to tomboy, within a few dacades, it had flipped gender and  had taken on the meaning of a female who behaves like that spirited boy. Defined in the dictionary like a wild, romping girl. Gender switches or a gender fluidity like these are not uncommon at all in the history of English, so you will find, for example, the first harlot was a man. The feirst meaning of punk was a promiscuous woman. Of course nowdays it can be either sex, a punk. A punk rocker. And even girls could apply to both sexies when it first came around, so it's quite common in English to find these sort of flips. But the Tom part of the equation, I think that it what Tom Adams actually was wondering about. And you will find that in tom cat, tomfoolery, "Tom, Dick and Harry", and that's because the name was simply used as a generic label for the common man, if you like, the man of the people. It wasn't just a Tom, JAck was also used in this way, if you think about jack of all trades or a lumberjack, and the idea is that there were the ordinary man and just used, as I say, as a generic name. But quite why we have tomboy and not tomgirl is always a bit of mistery. And anyway, we might want to forget the whole idea of tomboy these days because girls can do anything, as we know.