This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Morphodite is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
"Morphodite" is a comic pronunciation of the word hermaphrodite and is considered offensive.
Contents |
Appearance
Literature
It was used most notably in the 1960 book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee when, in Chapter 8, Miss Maudie refers to the snowman Jem and Scout built. To disguise the snowman's obvious and unfortunate resemblance to Mr. Avery, the children borrow Miss Maudie's hat and hedge-clippers. Their attempts to feminize the caricature fall short and Miss Maudie describes their creation as "an absolute morphodite." (Perhaps Lee also uses the word to represent race because of what the snowman is comprised of – white snow, brown dirt). It appears again, this time in Chapter 14, when Scout parrots the phrase she heard, and screams at her older brother Jem, "You damn morphodite, I'll kill you!"
Author Truman Capote used the word morphodite in The Grass Harp in 1951.1
It is also used, as an insult, in the one-act play "Crossing the Bar" by Don Nigro and in the Stephen King short story, "The Body" which appeared in the collection Different Seasons published in 1982.
Science fiction writer M. A. Foster used the word for his The Morphodite Trilogy, consisting of "The Morphodite" (1981), "Transformer" (1983) and "Preserver" (1985).
Other
It was also used on a 2006 episode of Spike TV's "Disorderly Conduct" in a string of insults hurled at a police officer arresting a very, very drunk man.
It appeared again in the 1986 film Stand By Me (which is based on Stephen King's "The Body"), with Teddy saying "Gordie, go get the provisions you morphodite!"
References
- ^ Oxford English Dictionary: T. CAPOTE Grass Harp (1951) i.3 "One of the stories he spread, that Verena was a morphodyte, has never stopped going around."
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 17 November 2008, at 05:45.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Morphodite".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.