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Pedants' corner

What happened to being plump or portly?

2 replies

Lilypansy · 03/07/2021 09:52

You used to read about characters in books being plump, well padded, portly and stout. Thin people were slender or sylphlike. Nowadays people are never referred to in these terms, they are either fat, overweight or obese, with thin people described as underweight.
The words plump etc are purely descriptive, whereas today's vocabulary indicates some kind of criticism.
When did we go from merely describing someone's appearance, to implicitly criticising it in the terms we use?

OP posts:
FortunesFave · 03/07/2021 12:21

Portly? Sylphlike?? What a crock. They're sill words...pretending people are something they're not.

People say plump still because someone can be plump without being obese. But we're better educated these days, plus obesity was very rare indeed in the old days.

Sylphlike is romanticized nonsense anyway.

MurielSpriggs · 09/07/2021 10:53

Sorry, as far as books go Google says you're wrong!

Eg "plump" on the rise since the eighties, and we are actually now at peak plumpness:
books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Plump&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CPlump%3B%2Cc0

The same for "portly":
books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Portly&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CPortly%3B%2Cc0

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