Talk:Spadone

Spadone
Much of the material that would have been expected to be under the headword eunuch is now in an article called spadone. I had not previously heard of this term. Nor, apparently, have the New Oxford Dictionary of English, dictionary.com, the Cambridge Dictionary of American English, or (except as a back-reference to the Wikipedia article in question) in OneLook. The word does not, as far as I can tell, occur in the current mainstream medical literature, based on a search of abstracts of articles stored in PubMed.

As far as I can tell, the word "spadone" is being used in this article as a "more correct" term for a castrated or impotent man because it occurs in Latin literature. However, I can't find any references to support this. The term "spadone" appears to be almost universally translated into English as "eunuch": see, for example, this reference used within the article itself. So does this reference, also used to support the spadone article: ; indeed, in its own words, it translates spadones et steriles as "eunuchs and the sterile", rather undermining the distinction being made by the article.

See also the UND Latin lookup tool, Whitaker's Words, which lists it as one of three words cognate to the English word "eunuch". Perseus appears to concur. Lewis and Short make a distinction between spadon and castratus, but this does not seem to me to be enough on which to base the distinction between "eunuch" and "spadone" made by the authors of the article.

While I can't say I've made an exhastive search, none of the web-accessible references given in the article actually appear to use the term "spadone" as an English word, either in the sense given in the article or any other. (Furthermore, several of the references given in the article only point to top-level pages in sites, and not to the material they cite, so it's impossible to use them to confirm anything at all.)

Nor can I find any usage anywhere else. Given my failure to find such usages, I can only conclude that the term is at the least very rarely used, in either common or scholarly English, or in medicine. Without evidence to the contrary, this suggests to me that the distinction being made in splitting the "eunuch" material into a "eunuch" article and a "spadone" article may well constitute original research based on extrapolating from Latin usage to English.

I therefore propose that the material currently in spadone either be merged into the eunuch article, or moved to another title. -- The Anome (talk) 13:11, 2 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Now done; the eunuch article has been returned to its previous state, and this page has become a disambiguation page. -- The Anome (talk) 14:37, 2 November 2009 (UTC)