Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Virago 2
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An anonymous user has made an empirical claim: that there exists an anthropological concept, "virago." Like any empirical claim, this can be tested. I tested an empirical claim. The empirical claim that you have made is that "virago" is an anthropological concept or object of anthropological study. So first, I used the search engine provided by the Ameican Anthropological Association, of every publication of the American Anthropological Association since its founding in the late 1800s. I searched for the word "virago" and found two ueses, one in a book review, and one in an article on spousal abse in Brazil. In both articles, the word was used as a colloquial word, like "broad" or "dame." It was not presented as the name of an object of analysis, nor as an analytic concept.
Second, I went to Medline, a search engine for all major medical and health-related journals, and did a search for "virago." Not one hit, not one.
Third, I checked Biosys, a search engine for all life-sciences journals, and discoverd a couple of hits — for species of flies or similar insects: Petalops virago and Nilobezzia virago.
Fourth, I tried the General Science search engine, of all core journals in all sciences. I found one hit: for a book, The Virago book of women gardeners. Do you want to know why it is called "The Virago book of women gardeners?" I will tell you: because it is published by the Virago Press.
Fifth, moving from the life-sciences, I tried the general Social Science search engine. Again, I found a few hits. Wanna know what a few of them were? Book reviews for The Virago book of women travellers and The Virago book of love poetry — yup, published by the Virago Press. There is also an article from the British Journal of Criminology: "These viragoes are no less cruel than the lads': young women, gangs and violence in late Victorian Manchester and Salford." The word "virago" is in a quote from a Victorian newspaper, the Chronicle, which used the word to describe female members of gangs. In other words, this data again confirms my claim that scholars use the word colloquially; it is no more a "scientific concept" as any other common noun. How many more search engines do you want me to try? I have established
- that virago is not an anthropological concept, nor a concept in any other social science.
- that virago is not a concept in medicine or health
- that virago is the name of two species of insects
- that virago is the name of a publishing house
Virago is an English word meaning tough woman, derived from a Latin word meaning heroine. If Wikipedia were a dictionary, we could provide the word "virago" and its definition. But Wikipedia is not a dictionary. And, having searched several data-bases, there are simply no verifiable sources on which one could base an aticle on "virago," without violating our NOR policy. Slrubenstein | Talk 21:34, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
