👉 Okay, letās tackle that rather delightfully prickly bit of linguistic weirdness ā the admittedly somewhat dusty and occasionally misused word, "muliebrous."
Now, traditionally, a āmuliebrous" thing was essentially a designation for something... overwhelmingly, undeniably, spectacularlyā¦
girlish
. Think of it as the old-wives' tale equivalent of saying something is positively brimming with a feminine vibe. Before we even considered that some people now find this phrasing rather antiquated and potentially ageist, letās unpack how the word actually came to be, because honestly, there's quite a dramatic history here!
Originally in late 17th-century Latin from the word "muliebris," meaning roughly, a woman. The early 18th century then gave us muliebrous as a descriptive adjective for women and things of feminine nature. And then, and I mean, THENāthe 19th and early 20th centuries saw it popping up in natural history descriptions, most notably by figures like the great ornithologist John Willis Nuttall, to describe⦠well... that of the female form in a rather descriptive way. He was describing what he saw as the very essence and nature of the feminine when referring to certain birds!
Letās be absolutely clear: We now generally avoid using it unless you're quoting from a historical text, dead-panning a description of a Victorian naturalist, or are genuinely joking about a ridiculously overfurnished