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Exuberant
What modern woman would take offense at having this innocent-seeming word applied to her? She might even take it as a compliment. In fact, it used to mean "overflowing udders," from Latin ex- (out) and uber (udder), giving exuberans. It seems an oddly intrusive, presumptuous and speculative way of describing any woman who was not nude and close by, and it might have been reserved, instead, for commentary on goats, cows and sheep.
Another puzzling word in this vein is nonchalant, the French, meaning a woman who does not heat up or has not yet done so. Non plus caleo, to be hot, explain it. Again, one wonders at the presumption, and the failure to heed such folk wisdom as "still waters run deep." Surely this word was meant to get a rise out of a female failing to respond to male overtures. She may well have been cool, in our modern sense of neat and snazzy, or of cool demeanor, or cool in our other modern sense of well-adjusted within herself. Whatever, she's a cool customer.
One shrinks from combining these two words, suspecting an exuberant woman of being heated up, or vice versa. There is too the old male canard that an exuberant woman can't help herself; her bosom leads her by the nose. Here are etymologies we are glad to forget.
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©1999
Paul West and Nerve.com
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