[Ads-l] nubile

[Laurence Horn]

Next frontier: buxom hunks.  The OED entry does allow for non-gender-nonexclusivity ("Chiefly of a girl or young woman”) for both sense 1 (‘marriageable; of an age or condition suitable for marriage; sexually mature’) and sense 3 (‘sexually attractive’), but none of the cites involve hunks or other male referents.  Sense 2, 'Of a person's age: suitable for marriage, permissible for marriage’, is more sex-neutral, as in

1910   Encycl. Brit. I. 373/1   In Greece the age of majority is twenty-one, and the nubile age sixteen for males and fourteen for females.

LH

> On Nov 12, 2019, at 2:06 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> IMDb review of "Midway":
> 
> "It's filled with a cavalcade of young, nubile Hollywood hunks (Nick Jonas,
> Ed Skrein, Keean Johnson, Darrin Criss)."
> 
> 
> JL
> -- 
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org