06.21.08
If you can’t buxom, join ’em
Today’s Unfortunate English moment, reflecting back on “unfortunate” word histories:
It’s every lecher’s dream that buxom wenches are buxom.
That statement seems ridiculously redundant until we return to the original meaning of buxom. The modern meaning, showing up by 1600, is “attractive, healthy” . . . and the usual sense today is “healthy” in a particular area of the body that sounds a lot like buxom: the bosom. The buxom wenches that our lechers are likely leering at are, in modern euphemism, well-endowed.
But the word buxom is based on the word bow—not the long-O bow that one might wear on one’s buxom bosom, by the “rhymes-with-wow” bow that one does in deference to another. In the original meaning, someone compliant, obedient, and inclined to bow was bow-some, or, in eventual spelling, buxom.
Now the lechers are catching on. If only that buxom wench was bowsome!
The simplified flow of the word’s meaning changes over the years was something like this, with admittedly some of my musing thrown in*: If one was compliant and obedient (the first sense, now obsolete, in use by 1200), one could in turn be gracious, affable and obliging (an obsolete sense in use by the late 1300s); being gracious, one could be in turn be cheerful, good-natured and jolly (in use by the late 1500s); being the cheery, jolly sort, one in turn could be interpreted to be healthy and possibly observed to be plump (also by the late 1500s).
On the other hand, maybe the lecher isn’t so eager that the wench declare herself to be “buxom at bed and at board,” in that this, until the phrase was removed in the 1500s, was part of the ancient ’til-death-do-us-part wedding vows we speak yet today.
Now, for the wench side of things, ladies might very well dream that handsome men are handsome.
Among the surviving modern meanings of handsome is “physically attractive, good looking” (a perception that is often enhanced if the handsome person takes home a handsome—or considerable and respectable—salary), in a sense in use by the late 1500s. But handsome, by the mid 1400s, was originally “easily handled or manipulated” (though the term was used in reference to things, like axes). This sense of physical grace was applied to figurative grace, and then back again to the physical grace of the handsome lechers dreaming of buxom wenches.
(* This brief historification is performed by a nonprofessional on an open course; do try this at home. And nowhere else.)
, 
and 
. Feel free to 
