• he-man •
Printable Version Pronunciation: hee-mæn • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: A manly, virile man, a strong man with well-developed muscles who avoids anything suggesting femininity (such as quiche)
Notes: Today's Good Word is odd in several ways. First, it is a compound noun containing a pronoun, something prohibited by English grammar. Only a few such words exist and they are rather peripheral: she-wolf and she-goat appear often enough though he-wolf and he-goat are rarely encountered. Moreover, there is no she-man or even she-woman (what would that be?) The plural is, as expected, he-men.
In Play: 
He-men are not guys; they are generally perceived to be tough and insensitive: "Jim Nasium was denied membership in the motorcycle gang because he wasn't enough of a he-man." Jim used a church key rather than his teeth to open his beer bottles; besides, he can read the labels! There are things we can do with this word, though: "Marilyn Baltimore wanted a moral rather than a physical he-man for a husband."
Word History: He is the descendant of the Old English word for "this". In Old English the third person pronouns were gender variants of the word for "this": he was "this (masculine)", hio, "this (feminine), hit, "this" (neuter). These forms evolved into today's he, she, and it. The original Proto-Indo-European root underlying he was ko-/ke- "this", which also went on to become Latin cis "this". With the suffix -eter it became kotoryi "which" in Russian and the cetera of et cetera "and the-rest" in Latin. Man turns up in several Indo-European languages, including German Mann and, with a suffix, Mensch "human", which English imported via Yiddish as mensch "decent person". In the Slavic languages it picked up a similar suffix but lost the N, becoming muzh "husband" and muzhik "peasant" in Russian.
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