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[MonkeyHead]

More like a Horo?

[Tellemurius]

you're missing a bracket

[USEC_OFFICER]

More like a Horo?

Yep! Or at least, that's what I'm thinking of. Don't know about greatorder.

you're missing a bracket

Actually it's the equal sign, but meh.

[Starver]

Eh, barbarian literally meant "not a roman / greek".

Even more literally, it meant someone whose language (non-Greek, at the origination of the term) just sounds like they're babbling "Bar bar bar bar barbar bar baaar bar!' when they talk.  (Although later it also applied to badly-spoken Greek, usually as done by non-natives.)  Or it could have been a reference to the beards of the barbarians, with the same linguistic root as "Barber" has, regarding beard, but unless there's a stylistic distinction from the barbarian kind, classicist (and contemporaneously classical!) depictions of Greeks often included beards on their elders, at least, so that explanation seems a stranger and less likely etymology to me.

Of course this (whichever meaning) developed so that at one time there was the phrase "He who is not Greek is a Barbarian" (obviously originally said in Ancient Greek, not our barbarious language), giving your literal interpretation.  Hence I'm not saying you're wrong, just that that's a derivative meaning.


The Romans, of course, pinched so much from the Greeks that (culturally, as well as in other ways) that they probably thought the same, even if the term was now a concrete one in its own right.

[Loud Whispers]

It's interesting how some weapons were given attributes. Bows were seen as womanly for as far back as Ancient Greece (mind you, they wouldn't let a woman near a bow but still), Naginatas became iconic with Onna-bugeisha, and Gaelic women were renown for being absolutely fearless, crazy and skilled with their martial prowess.

Obligatory pic:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

More on the topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_warfare_and_the_military_in_the_ancient_era

[MonkeyHead]

Boudica (Bodaciea) being a classic and well documented example.

[Starver]

It's interesting how some weapons were given attributes. Bows were seen as womanly for as far back as Ancient Greece[...]

Well, if you're going to genderise your equiment, then bows (at least longbows) are going to be considered more womanly than most of the frankly phallic mêlée weapons...  That's not including the "you've got to treat your bow like your woman, treat her right, know just how much to ply her to get the job done right" clichéd stuff that you probably get the old, haggard and probably downright sexually frustrated veteran telling the new lads.  'Birthing' your arrows (loosing their male children off into battle, while staying home 'herself') is another analogous way of looking at it.

But I'm sure there's been plenty of Gender Studies analyses about weapons of war, and I don't want to crash in with my own half-baked theories when it's already been done to death thirty years or more ago.