Hello,

This week’s word, feisty, comes with thanks to “An Emotional Dictionary” by Susie Dent. I was surprised to learn from this excellent book that feisty has more to do with little dogs and farting than it does with the ever popular feisty female trope in fiction.

I’m always wary of adjectives only used to describe females (strident, hysterical, bossy, airhead, for example) and feisty falls into this category. What does it mean exactly? The dictionary tells me it’s a person, typically one who is relatively small, who is lively, determined, and brave. These are all positive things and not exclusively female.

Feisty is a relatively recent addition to the English language. It arrived in American English in the late 1800s to describe somebody as aggressive, exuberant, and touchy but the source of feist is where it gets interesting. A feist was a small dog (spelled as fice or fist sometimes) and was called a fysting curre (stinking cur) since the 1500s. What did fysting mean then? Well, to fisten in Middle English meant to break wind, thanks to a Proto-Germanic root word – fistiz (a fart) which provides a cousin word in Danish.

The dogs may have been blamed in error. One 1800s slang dictionary claimed little old ladies blamed their lap-dogs for their own windy explosions. Unsurprising then that the small dogs were sometimes aggressive as well as aromatic.

The next time somebody calls you feisty, pause a moment to wonder, are they complimenting your bravery, calling you small, or saying you’re full of wind?

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

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