{"id":18058,"date":"2019-11-09T01:06:24","date_gmt":"2019-11-09T09:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=18058"},"modified":"2019-11-09T01:07:31","modified_gmt":"2019-11-09T09:07:31","slug":"tousy-mousy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2019\/11\/09\/tousy-mousy\/","title":{"rendered":"tousy-mousy"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>According to an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/booksblog\/2019\/nov\/07\/does-it-matter-if-mary-shelley-was-bisexual\">article<\/a> by Fern Riddell, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley once wrote to a friend:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>I was so ready to give myself away\u2014and being afraid of men, I was apt to get tousy-mousy for women.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>Apparently (according to that same article), <i>tuzzy-muzzy<\/i> is \u201cslang for the vagina,\u201d dating back to 1642.<\/p>\r\n<p>Only one of my five slang dictionaries (Partridge\u2019s 8th, 1984) lists either of those terms; it defines <i>tuzzy-muzzy<\/i> or <i>tuzzi-muzzy<\/i> or <i>tuzzymuzzy<\/i> as \u201cthe female pudend,\u201d dating back to 1710. The Shorter OED also lists <i>tuzzy-muzzy<\/i> or <i>tussie-mussie<\/i> with the same meaning, along with an alternative meaning: a bunch of flowers. (And <i>tussy<\/i> by itself means, essentially, \u201ctousled.\u201d)<\/p>\r\n<p>Surely Shelley just meant that she liked to buy flowers for women! \u2026Okay, maybe not.<\/p>\r\n<p>I do think it\u2019s interesting, though, that she used the phrase <i>get tousy-mousy for<\/i>; I\u2019m certainly willing to believe that that phrase is sexual slang, and I get the general idea of what she seems to have meant, but the exact meaning of her usage doesn\u2019t seem obvious to me if <i>tousy-mousy<\/i> refers to genitalia per se.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-to-me-words","category-slang"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18058"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18060,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18058\/revisions\/18060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}