prissy..prim..straight-laced...starchy

You talkin' to meeeee?

(kidding, navigator..)

These words are not used so commonly now in, say, the average US magazine. For one thing, it is harder to find a prim straight-laced starchy person, prissy or not, today than it was in my youth, around the time of the Kennedys, the early sixties. Young ladies (women! sometimes we were called women!) wore prim suits, sometimes with starched blouses.

We even wore girdles, a version of female hell. Maybe or maybe not the laces were straight (implying correct). I never wore one of those, the laced ones slightly before my time or at least before my acquaintance. Even tiny women wore girdles, at least city girls did, and I was then tiny. They were like wearing a rubber tourniquet.

Wearing them had to do - I have figured out since - with not having flesh wiggle visibly.

Prissy... that referred to attitude, a bit hard to describe now.
Best seen in caricaturish portrayals in forties movies...

However, I still like those words, and will throw them into my speech if it ever seems appropriate.

Adding on -

starchy as a word then had to do with an aloof sort of attitude,
and straight-laced had to do with "brooking no (bad behavior or unseemly talk)

Ironically, starchy prissy figures have always been fun, I gather, for guys to "de-flower".

Prissy
Interesting you should bring this up - I teach Spanish, and I have a hard time finding a word that means "prissy" in Spanish - it seems there isn't one that captures the full effect.

How would you define Prissy?

There's actually no such word as "straight-laced". The word you're thinking of is "strait-laced". "Strait is an old English adjective meaning "tight" or "narrow". It's hardly ever used now on its own, but you still hear it in the plural noun form "straits", meaning a narrow sea passage between two land masses, and in the compounds "straitjacket" and "straitlaced".
In the 17th and 18th centuries all Englishwomen wore stiff corsets, and respectable women laced them up tightly, or "straitly". It was felt that loose clothing was a sign of "loose" morals.

You're right, I didn't catch that.

"Priscilla" was a name favored by the Pilgrims and Puritans, both stern and upright sects. I believe that the term was first "Miss Priss" and then "Prissy".

"Prissy" was also applied to Good Little Girls who never got dirty or talked sassy or acted like normal children. Naturally these paragons grew up to be not only prim and proper, but prissy--super prim and proper.

Ya got me on that one, too, syntinen. I always assumed (and spelled) straight laced.

Navagator, I would use the first three interchangeably. Never heard "Starchy."

I think "starchy" is more British than American. Think of stiff collars and the reinforced respectability of the lower middle class.

You are right syntinen, missed that too.I found out that prissy is too worried about behaving correctly, and easily shocked by anything rude.


Thanks everybody..

Thanks Noddy

If I was told that someone was "strait-laced" I would assume that s/he really has strict morals, whereas someone "prissy" or "prim" just acts demure and easily-shocked. "Starchy" - and I agree that it's mostly a British term - is more "old-fashioned and conventional"; it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with morals or bad language. For example, a starchy old retired (British) colonel would be shocked to see a gentleman using an umbrella in the country, unless he were playing golf and it were a golfing umbrella.

(N.B: don't ask me for the logic behind that. There isn't any. But for nearly two hundred years well-bred Englishmen have let themselves get soaked in the rain rather than commit the crashing social error of using an umbrella in the country.)

Syntinen, that last post is absolutely facinating.

glad to oblige!