Pussy (pronounced poos-ee or puhs-ee)
(1) In
informal use, a cat, especially a kitten (also as puss & pussy-cat).
(2) In colloquial use (now rare), an affectionate term for a woman or girl, seen as having characteristics associated with kittens such as sweetness or playfulness.
(3) Anything soft and furry; a bloom form; a furry catkin,
especially that of the pussy willow
(4) An
alternative name for the tipcat (rare).
(5) In
slang, a disparaging and offensive term referring to a timid, passive person
(applied almost exclusively to men).
(6) In
vulgar slang, the vulva (used as an alternative to the many other slang terms
which includes beaver, box, cunt, muff, snatch, twat poontang,
coochie, punani, quim & slit); considered by some to be the least
offensive and probably the one most used by women.
(7) In
vulgar slang, sexual intercourse with a woman
(8) In
vulgar slang of male homosexuals, the anus of a man who
is the passive participant in gay sex (ie “the bottom” as used by “the top”).
(9) In
slang, a disparaging and offensive term for women collectively, a form of
reductionism which treats women as sex objects.
(10) In
medical use (pronounced puhs-ee),
something puss-like or something from which puss emerges; containing or
resembling pus.
(11) As
pussybow (or lavallière, pussycat bow
or pussy-bow) a style of neckwear worn with women's blouses and bodices. A bow,
tied (usually loosely) at the neck, the name is though derrived from the bows
owners sometimes attach to their domestic felines (pussy cats).
1580s: The construct was puss + -y (the diminutive suffix). It may be from the Dutch poesje, a diminutive of poes (cat; vulva), akin to the Low German pūse (vulva) and the Old English pusa (bag). Puss was probably from the Middle Low German pūs or pūskatte or the Dutch poes (puss, cat (slang for vulva)), ultimately from a common Germanic word for cat, perhaps ultimately imitative of a sound made to get its attention and therefore similar in origin to the Arabic بسة (bissa). Some sources declare puss in the sense of "cat" dates from the 1520s but this is merely the earliest known documented source and use probably long predates this instance. The same or similar sound is a conventional name for a cat in Germanic languages and as far off as Afghanistan; it is the root of the principal word for "cat" in the Rumanian (pisica) and secondary words in the Lithuanian (puž (word used for calling a cat)), the Low German (puus) and the Irish puisin (a kitten). It was akin to the West Frisian poes, Low the German Puus & Puuskatte, the Danish pus, the dialectal Swedish kattepus & katte-pus and the Norwegian pus. The form is known in several European, North African and West Asian languages and may be compared with the Romanian pisică and Sardinian pisittu; there is also a Celtic thread, the Irish pus (mouth, lip), from the Middle Irish bus. The noun plural was pussies.
Pussy was first used as a term of endearment for a girl or woman in the 1580s and (by extension), was soon used disparagingly of effeminate men and) and applied childishly to anything soft and furry. The use to refer to domestic cats & kittens was exclusive by the 1690s but as early as 1715 it was applied also to rabbits. The use as slang for "female pudenda" is documented from 1879, but most etymologists don’t doubt it had long been in oral use; perhaps from the Old Norse puss (pocket, pouch) (related to the Low German puse (vulva)) or else a re-purposing of the cat word pussy on the notion of "soft, warm, furry thing. In this it may be compared with the French le chat, which also has a double meaning, feline and genital. The earlier uses in English are difficult to distinguish from pussy, “pussie” noted in 1583 being applied affectionately to women. Pussy-whipped in the sense of "hen-pecked" seems to date from 1956, a gentler form perhaps than the fifteenth century Middle English cunt-beaten (an impotent man). Despite the feeling among many that the history in vulgar slang is long, etymologists note the rarity (sometimes absence) of pussy in its ribald sense from early dictionaries of slang and the vernacular before the late nineteenth century and the frequent use as a term of endearment in mainstream literature.
The pleonastic noun pussy-cat (also pussycat) which describes a domestic cat or kitten dates from 1773 and came soon to be applied to people although there appears to be no written record prior to 1859. By the early twentieth century it came to be applied to smoothly running engines, the idea being they “purred like a pussycat”. The noun pussy-willow was by 1835 a popular name of a type of common American shrub or small tree, so-called for the small and very silky catkins produced in early spring; in the 1850s the tree was also referred to as a pussy-cat but use soon faded. To “play pussy” was World War II Royal Air Force (RAF) slang for "take advantage of cloud cover, jumping from cloud to cloud to shadow a potential victim or avoid recognition." The medical use, the other (disgusting) adjectival forms of which are pussier & pussiest, dates from circa 1890 although in this sense Middle English had the mid-fifteenth century pushi, a variant of the Latin pus (definite singular pussen or pusset) which in pathology describes the yellowish fluid associated with infected tissue.
As a set-piece event, about the only thing which could have added to the spectacle of the Depp v Heard (John C Depp II v Amber Laura Heard (CL–2019–2911)) suit & counter-suit defamation trial in Fairfax County, Virginia, might have been Ms Heard (b 1986) afforcing her legal team with Rudy Giuliani (b 1944). Whatever difficulties Mr Giuliani has had with judges, he was good with juries and may have been better at persuading the tribunal assembled in Virginia to ignore the many irrelevant revelations which so tantalized those running commentaries on social media. As it was, there was something in the trial for just about everyone and one thing claimed by some to have exerted a subliminal influence on judge and jury was what model Kate Moss (b 1974 and appearing as a character witness for Mr Depp (b 1963) which whom she’d enjoyed a predictably well-publicized relationship during the 1990s) wore for her brief testimony. That she appeared at all was because Ms Heard made the mistake of mentioning her name during testimony, thereby permitting Mr Depp's counsel to call her as a witness. Looking stunning as expected, her appearance was quickly deconstructed and pronounced as crafted to convey “authority and authenticity”, the key points being (1) a simple hair-style, (2) an “authoritative jacket”, (3) “natural make-up” and (4) a blouse with a pussybow “casually tied” to avoid the appearance of a contrived “court appearance look”. In other words, she’d been styled to look like a witness appearing in court, not an actor playing a witness appearing in court. Her three minutes on the stand via a video link should not, according to some lawyers, have been treated by the jury as substantive but what attracted most comment was her choice of a white, spotted pussybow blouse, a feature described in one gushing critique as “…subtly subversive” with an origin as a kind of feminist battledress for those beginning the march through the institutions of male space; a challenge to the “traditional dress codes”.
Items recognizably pussybowish had been worn for centuries but the re-purposing to an alleged political statement is traced to the early 1960s when Coco Chanel (1883-1971) added more voluminous bows to silk blouses, the bulk and projection of the fabric off-setting the more severe linens and tweeds with which they were paired. From there, the pussybow as feminist statement is held to have become overt in 1966 with the debut of Yves Saint Laurent's (1936-2008) Le Smoking design which legitimized the presence of the pantsuit in catalogues and, increasingly, on the catwalk. The 1966 piece was a revived tuxedo, tailored to the female form, in velvet or wool and notable for being softened with a silk pussybow blouse which was interesting in that had it been combined with the traditional tie worn by men (which wouldn’t then have been anything novel), it would probably have been condemned, not as subversive but as a cliché. As it was, the pussybow lent sufficient femininity to the redefined pantsuit for it to be just radical enough to be a feminist fashion statement yet not be seen as too threatening. Despite the claims of some, it wasn’t the first time the pussybow had been paired with trousers but it was certainly the first appearance at a mainstream European show and it proved influential although YSL, so pleased with his models, perhaps didn’t envisage the look on latter-day adopters like crooked Hillary Clinton.
Whether the judge or jury in Virginia were pussybow-whipped into finding substantially for Mr Depp isn’t known but it was certainly interesting Ms Heard lost in the US but won in the UK in 2020 despite both trials being essentially about the same thing: Did Mr Depp subject Ms Heard to violence and other forms of abuse? Technically, there were differences, Mr Depp in the UK suing not his ex-wife but The Sun, a tabloid newspaper which had published a piece with a headline describing Mr Depp as a "wife beater". By contrast, the US case revolved around an article in The Washington Post written by Ms Heard, the critical passages being three instances where she alleged she had been a victim of domestic abuse. Mr Depp sued not the newspaper but Ms Heard, claiming her assertions were untrue and (although he wasn’t explicitly named as the perpetrator), that he’d thus been defamed. The jury agreed Ms Heard (1) had indeed implied she was the victim of Mr Depp’s violence, (2) that her claims were untrue, (3) that purposefully she was being untruthful and (4) that her conduct satisfied the legal standard of “actual malice”, a critical threshold test in US law (dating from a ruling by the US Supreme Court in 1964 in New York Times v Sullivan) which imposes on public figures the need to prove statements (even if anyway technically defamatory) were made with the knowledge they were false or with reckless disregard of whether they were false or not, before damages may be recovered.
More significant still was probably that in London, the trial took place before a high court judge who ruled on both matters of law and fact. By contrast, in the Fairfax County Courthouse, the judge ruled on matters of law but it was the jury which alone weighed the evidence presented and determined matter of fact. Thus in London one legally trained judge assessed the evidence which hung on the issue of whether Mr Depp subjected Ms Heard to violent abuse during their brief and clearly turbulent union. The judge found he had whereas seven lay-people, sitting as a jury concluded he had not. The two processes are difficult to compare because judges provide written judgments (comprising the ratio decidendi (the reasons for the finding) and sometimes some obiter dictum (other matters of interest not actually critical in reaching the decision)) whereas juries operate in secret and what was discussed in the three days they took to deliberate isn’t known although there are hints in the list of questions they presented to the judge before delivering the verdict. Those hints however hardly compare with Mr Justice Nichol’s (b 1951) ruling of some 67,000 words.
Sue Lyon (1946-2019) in pussybow blouse in the film Lolita (1962) (left) and with pussy (right) in an image from a pre-release publicity set for the film, shot in 1960 by Bert Stern (1929-2013).
What happened in the two trials was not exactly comparable. In the US, much was made of several statements earlier made by Ms Heard which, although not directly concerned with the matters being litigated, once proved untrue, were used by Mr Depp’s legal team to undermine Ms Heard’s credibility. The matter of the US$7 million divorce settlement was for example mentioned by Mr Justice Nichol as an example of Ms Heard’s credibility because she didn't profit from divorcing Mr Depp, citing her announcement that she would donate the settlement to charity. That she failed to do and perhaps remarkably, it wasn’t something at the time challenged by Mr Depp’s lawyers so the judge accepted it as fact. Whether, had the judge known the truth, his findings would have be different will never be known. Of interest too is that as a matter of law, Ms Heard's lawyers were not allowed to tell the jury the result of the UK trial and that in London Mr Depp's lawyers had made it clear they felt it unfair they were compelled to sue the newspaper and not Ms Heard. In Virginia, as a defendant, Ms Heard became the focus and it did seem much of what was presented to the jury discussed her credibility, not of necessity relating to the substantive matters of the case but also of previous statements and conduct.
When the judgment in London was appealed, that was rejected by two judges of the Court of Appeal which may encourage Ms Heard. Proceeding with an appeal in the US is a high-risk business and there are financial impediments even to lodging the papers but it is something which will not involve a jury, decided instead on points of law and procedure by judges less likely than jury members to be influenced by films they’ve seen, pussybows or other extraneous material.
Pussy Riot band members Yekaterina Samutsevich, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in a glass-walled cage during a court hearing, Moscow, Friday 17 August 2012.
The very modern-sounding arrangement was made possible by Ms Stevenson having been appointed by Lloyd-George as his secretary while he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, a job offer which was conditional upon her accepting concubinage as part of the job description and it’s never been doubted Lloyd-George was an earlier adopter of KPIs. The press were aware of the situation but things were done differently then and not a word of the unusual domestic setup appeared in the papers. Surprisingly, even foreign journalists turned a blind eye when Lloyd George attended the Paris Peace Conference (1919) in the company of Ms Stevenson and though the rumor mill among the diplomats would have worked as efficiently then as now, the fiction she was “just his secretary” was maintained by all. In the lovers’ private conversations, she was his “Pussy” and he her “Tom Cat”, the feline theme taken up in his son’s 1960s biography when he noted of his father: “…with an attractive woman he was as much to be trusted as a Bengal tiger with a gazelle”. In 1975, Weidenfeld and Nicolson published My darling Pussy: The letters of Lloyd George and Frances Stevenson, 1913-1941 (258 pp; ISBN-13: 978-0297770176).
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