draggletailed
Oct. 8th, 2021 07:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prettygoodworddraggletailed or draggle-tailed (DRAG-uhl-tayld) - adj., (arch.) bedraggled, untidy, slovenly.
Formerly and formally, a more precise word than bedraggled, which is limp and dirty from being dragged on the ground -- though that's part of the root of this. The tail here is a skirt that's so long it drags, with an implication that this is the result of clothes being not neat. This used to be applied specifically to a certain type of woman, and that sense is marked as archaic in dictionaries, but I've seen it used essentially as an intensified form of bedraggled -- something lexicographers don't seem to have noticed yet.
And that's a week of dozens ... sort of. Today's word actually has 13 letters, but since that's a baker's dozen, I'm still calling it a dozen letters.
---L.
Formerly and formally, a more precise word than bedraggled, which is limp and dirty from being dragged on the ground -- though that's part of the root of this. The tail here is a skirt that's so long it drags, with an implication that this is the result of clothes being not neat. This used to be applied specifically to a certain type of woman, and that sense is marked as archaic in dictionaries, but I've seen it used essentially as an intensified form of bedraggled -- something lexicographers don't seem to have noticed yet.
And that's a week of dozens ... sort of. Today's word actually has 13 letters, but since that's a baker's dozen, I'm still calling it a dozen letters.
---L.
