macho man

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:16 PM -0600 2/12/02, Yerkes, Susan wrote:
>Larry, Lynne et. al.
>
>This is my first posting, and I have to say I am extremly intimidated --
>please bear with me, y' all.
>
>As as a resident in macholand (South Texas) I think I can say with certainty
>that "macho man" is at best a hyponym.
>Male man, on the other hand, would be a pleonasm under the definition Lynn
>Murphy cites (as, less entertainingly, would be a phrase such as "the man he
>said," which Webster's 9th New Collegiate cites).
>
I'm not sure how you're using these labels.  A hyponym is essentially
a subcase, so that COLLIE is a hyponym of DOG, PUPPY is a hyponym of
DOG and, for me, MACHO (as used in English) is a hyponym of MAN/MALE.
The last is debatable, and the responses suggest some variation here.
But I'm not sure what it would mean to say "male man" is a pleonasm
or that "macho man" is a hyponym--in the former case, MALE is a
hyponym of MAN (they're not synonyms, because boys can be male and I
have a cat that's male or that used to be male, depending on your
definition), and in the latter case, MACHO is indeed a hyponym of
MAN, but MACHO MAN isn't a hyponym of anything discussed here.  Maybe
we need a new expression for the particular kind of pleonasm of the
form XY where X is a hyponym of Y.  It's not quite an oxymoron.
Hypomoron, anyone?

larry