Where did you get your definition of effeminate?
From McHugh and Callan's moral theology.
2456. (B): Opposed to steadfastness by deficiency is the vice of effeminacy or weakness, by excess the vice of pertinacity. The effeminate person, lacking stamina to go on in a necessary good, surrenders to weariness or opposition by abandoning the undertaking or by taking up with evil (Matt., xi. 7, 8). The pertinacious person continues in the course he has begun when right reason bids him to discontinue, as when one has taken a vow and does not wish to accept the dispensation which a change of circuмstances necessitates. These sins are venial unless they go counter to a grave duty, as when an effeminate person gives up the resolution to avoid a very dangerous occasion of sin, or the headstrong person determines to fast during the remainder of Lent when this will seriously injure his health.
The word seems to have been perverted just like "scandal" has.
Now scandal also means a loud noise or a commotion or some other disorder, not the spiritual ruin of others.
It seems that the word has the same meaning today as it did in the 1828 edition of Webster's Dictionary:
EFFEM'INATE, a. [L. effoeminatus, from effoeminor, to grow or make womanish, from foemina, a woman. See Woman.]
1. Having the qualities of the female sex; soft or delicate to an unmanly degree; tender; womanish; voluptuous.
The king, by his voluptuous life and mean marriage, became effeminate, and less sensible of honor.
2. Womanish; weak; resembling the practice or qualities of the sex; as an effeminate peace; an effeminate life.
3. Womanlike, tender, in a sense not reproachful.
EFFEM'INATE, v.t. To make womanish; to unman; to weaken; as to effeminate children.
EFFEM'INATE, v.i. To grow womanish or weak; to melt into weakness.
In a slothful peace courage will effeminate.
It also seems that this is how McHugh and Callan are using the word in the context quoted above. Disputaciones's definition:
To behave and speak like a woman is not to be effeminate. Effeminacy is something different altogether, having to do with sadness and not with unnatural sins.
doesn't even make sense in the context of McHugh and Callan. Nor can I find any dictionary the gives his definition. It is Disputaciones who has perverted the word, not
everyone else.
LaramieHirsch is absolutely right. The perversion of language comes from the liberal-minded who want to qualify perversions and unnatural behavior. And why do they so much desire to destroy and change the understanding of words?
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?
By subtlety adjusting the definitions of certain words and eliminating others altogether, the liberals hope to make even though idea of unnatural behavior something that cannot even be conceived, let alone understood. Frankly, they have been very successful as fewer and fewer people can even understand what the problems are of these vices and behaviors.
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