January 20, 2023: Rabbit Hole, Not in the Sense of Hares -

Vocab update: I thought maybe “pusillanimous,” (fancy word for “cowardly”) was somehow related to “pussy,” (insult about being girly), but the OED doesn’t buy it as a derivation or an etymology, even with those matching first few letters.   

“Pusillanimous” means “manifesting a lack of courage or determination,” and from the very first entry, it’s used to insult a man’s manliness.

?1611   G. Chapman in tr. Homer Iliads i. Comm.   Who can deny, that there are teares of manlinesse and magnanimity, as well as womanish and pusillanimous?

(Here’s a defense of manly crying! Good! Followed by a swipe at womanly crying! Bad! But my personal disappointment is that somehow even with both words playing in the same semantic area, there’s no link between them.  Dang. It looked so promising.)

Our friend “pussy,” has eleven OED entries in the cat-coward-female group (also one about hares, and one about people with big bellies, and one about pus, and so forth).  Pussy goes back to the 1500s in its “kitten” sense, back to the 1600s in its “cat-like woman” and also its related “female anatomy” senses, and only back to 1904 in its “suggesting a man is cowardly and homosexual” sense.

I am hoping to be fascinated by a new word next week.