Get Your Hands Off Me, (Wo)man!

An interesting phenomenon I observerd recently was two young boys, both 5 if I remember correctly, who have developed an interesting emphatic element to their speech. The first boy, let's call him Mac, was misbehaving in some way or another, so I intervened, which required putting myself in his path, and preventing his escape with my physical person, specifically my arms. Upon running into my arms he exclaimed Get your hands off me, woman! Now, I may've had hair longer than your average Joe at this point, but Mac definitely knows that I am male. I sadly don't remember exactly what the next boy, Greg let's say, said, but it was basically an echoing of Mac's sentiment along the lines of Yeah, woman! and it's quite possible that Greg was merely parroting Mac's words. Mac did however produce another sentence with woman! tacked on that has since escaped me, but even had he not, we are still left witht the original generation of woman in Mac's speech.

So, why did Mac seem to think that this was something to say to me? Sure, little kids seem to say silly things all of the time, Greg himself is notorious for confusing me with another grown-up he knows but I don't think that this is the case. It looks to me, that at some point Mac heard a sentence produced by a man something like Do the dishes, woman! quite possibly as part of a gag on a television program, (a teacher I know half-jokingly suggested Spongebob as a culprit) and observed that that sentence seems to have a lot more force than the relatively wimpy Do the dishes!

I am sure that he is able to tell the difference between men and women, and knows what the word woman means, I think he just chose to focus on the position at the end, since it seemed to be the significant change to the amount of emphasis in the sentence. I also truly don't think he was trying to emasculate or demean me by calling me a woman. In fact, Mac would probably have said something like Get your hands off me, man! if he had a better sense of productivity. Apparently lacking this, he defaulted to the original as he still needed something in the slot to better drill his point home.

(Thanks to Rachel for significant feedback)