This week’s theme
Words related to historical fashion

This week’s words
corset
tight-laced
bodice ripper
starchy
velvet glove

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(BOD-is rip-uhr)

MEANING:

noun: A type of historical romance, such as a novel or film, featuring passionate and often explicit romantic encounters and forced seduction.

ETYMOLOGY:

From bodice (fitted upper part of a woman’s dress), a respelling of bodies, plural of body + ripper, from rip, from Middle English rippen (to pull out sutures). Earliest documented use: 1979.

NOTES:

The trope of a female protagonist resisting aggressive sexual advances in vain only to fall in love reflects outdated attitudes towards consent and gender roles.
The word “bodies” was earlier pronounced with an /s/ sound (instead of a /z/ sound). This led to the alternative spelling “bodice”. So bodice was originally a plural and often used in the form “a pair of bodice”. This was because they were constructed in two pieces fastened together, similar to how we refer to “a pair of pants”. Why this upper-body garment was named after the body itself? Sometimes we name things by association, just as we call each side of a pair of pants a “leg”.

USAGE:

“Kavanaugh was a protege of the former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, and a principal author of the Starr Report, the investigative bodice ripper that transfixed the reading public in the autumn of 1998. As a prosecutor, Kavanaugh set a bracing literary standard (‘On all nine of those occasions, the President fondled and kissed her bare brεasts ...’).”
Jeffrey Toobin; Holding Court; The New Yorker; Mar 26, 2012.

See more usage examples of bodice_ripper in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: