vivacious

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 08:50:25AM -0700, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
> > NYT Magazine, 7/5/09, Mark Leibovitch, "On the Coast of Crazy" (about
> > Gavin Newsom), p. 29:
> >
> >   He is vivacious and something of a political thrill-seeker ...
> >
> > my eye was caught by "vivacious", which sounded a bit odd to me used
> > of a man.  NOAD2 says:
> >   (esp. of a woman) attractively lively and animated
> >
> > (AHD4 and the OED have no note.)
> >
> > raw google webhits have "she is vivacious" slightly ahead of "he is
> > vivacious", but only slightly.  and the relevant OED cites are pretty
> > well balanced.  so i'm not sure why i (and NOAD2) associate
> > "vivacious" with women more than men.
>
> FWIW, I share this association.

For some analysis of "vivacious" and its (gendered) collocates in the Oxford
English Corpus, see:

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http://www.askoxford.com/oec/mainpage/oec04/

Typically, only certain types of noun are modified by the adjective vivacious.
It seems that women and especially young women are vivacious, men and boys are
not (nor animals, apparently). Furthermore, the use of the word vivacious
conveys something more generally about a woman's attractiveness, hence the
frequent collocation with other adjectives such as 'beautiful', 'young', and
'blonde'. The brief dictionary entry (from the 2nd edition of the Oxford
Dictionary of English) tries to encapsulate some of the detail of this picture:

    vivacious adj. (especially of a woman) attractively lively and animated.
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--Ben Zimmer

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