The census of the wayward and unchaste
Jan. 9th, 2013 11:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slipjig3Chatting with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
belgatherial the other night, in response to a statement from her that I do not recall, I playfully referred to her as a "trollop." She replied that no, she was not so much a trollop as a strumpet, as the latter term seemed to connote more of a playful joie de vivre. Naturally, as all good sex talk should, things devolved into a trip to the thesaurus.
The list we found and considered (not as all-inclusive as it could be) was as follows:
hussy, minx, coquette, tease, seductress, Lolita, Jezebel, slut, harlot, loose woman, floozy, tart, vamp, tramp, trollop, jade, strumpet
We quickly agreed that the various terms for wanton women have pronounced qualitative differences, and devoted the next chunk of our Skype date to trying to delineate them: A tease is someone who says she will but doesn't actually, unless she's French, in which case she's a coquette. A harlot takes her sluthood as a tacit religious calling, while with a Jezebel, the only religious one is the one using the term in the first place. Minx, tart and hussy are merely variations of the same thing, arranged in order of distance from floor to hemline. A tramp is a seductress after four cheap beers, and a floozy is the same with a substantial IQ reduction.belgatherial felt strongly that "loose woman" should be reserved for scullery-maids in nightstand Victorian novels, the sort who keep getting backed into armoires and bent over dressing tables with little protest: "Oh, Lord Cronenweth! How scandalous!" We disagreed on "vamp"—she thinks "Goth club rat," while I go for "noir femme fatale."
But this is all purely subjective, I'm well aware, so I'll open the floor to discussion. Ignoring for the moment whether or not the difference between such terms for men and such terms for women is wrong and unfair (SPOILER: it totally is like whoa), how would you categorize the terms above? Is there anything that the preceding list from the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus woefully omitted?
belgatherial the other night, in response to a statement from her that I do not recall, I playfully referred to her as a "trollop." She replied that no, she was not so much a trollop as a strumpet, as the latter term seemed to connote more of a playful joie de vivre. Naturally, as all good sex talk should, things devolved into a trip to the thesaurus.The list we found and considered (not as all-inclusive as it could be) was as follows:
hussy, minx, coquette, tease, seductress, Lolita, Jezebel, slut, harlot, loose woman, floozy, tart, vamp, tramp, trollop, jade, strumpet
We quickly agreed that the various terms for wanton women have pronounced qualitative differences, and devoted the next chunk of our Skype date to trying to delineate them: A tease is someone who says she will but doesn't actually, unless she's French, in which case she's a coquette. A harlot takes her sluthood as a tacit religious calling, while with a Jezebel, the only religious one is the one using the term in the first place. Minx, tart and hussy are merely variations of the same thing, arranged in order of distance from floor to hemline. A tramp is a seductress after four cheap beers, and a floozy is the same with a substantial IQ reduction.
belgatherial felt strongly that "loose woman" should be reserved for scullery-maids in nightstand Victorian novels, the sort who keep getting backed into armoires and bent over dressing tables with little protest: "Oh, Lord Cronenweth! How scandalous!" We disagreed on "vamp"—she thinks "Goth club rat," while I go for "noir femme fatale."But this is all purely subjective, I'm well aware, so I'll open the floor to discussion. Ignoring for the moment whether or not the difference between such terms for men and such terms for women is wrong and unfair (SPOILER: it totally is like whoa), how would you categorize the terms above? Is there anything that the preceding list from the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus woefully omitted?
