👉 Right then, settle yourselves down, let’s tackle a rather pretty, and frankly, rather needlessly ornate phrase – "
avourly cheeked.
🥳." (Okay, that last grinning face emoji was purely for dramatic effect. Let's just stick to the word itself.) 3
Now, I’ve spent years dissecting this sort of thing. Frankly, there isn’t a straightforward, bloody good origin for it. That is what makes it interesting! Historically, and here's where you start to get into some rather prickly territory, the turn-of-the-20th century saw this creep up in the diaries and letters of a gaggle of absolutely dreadful Edwardian young women. These were the sort who described boys as being positively... luminous. You know, all that blushing, pretty-boy stuff. Essentially, it started as an affectation—a little bit of embroidered, frankly rather desperate, prettyness. People wanted to describe a boy's face with the almost unbelievable sheen of youth and, well, want . It was meant to be, you see, delicately suggestive, but not exactly…explicit. Think of the most coy young maid in a Victorian painting. There is an undercurrent of that. The term itself is a bit of a bastard. "Swarthy cheeked" would have been perfectly sensible and descriptive. But no, it had to be... avourly. . It’s
