monkeyess
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: monkeyesses
Etymology: From monkey + -ess.
Senses: examples: text: Here’s monkey Wieland, the youth of Old Drury, / Whose acting alone filled the manager’s purse; / His ma wa’n’t a monkeyess, I can assure ye, / But he certainly must have had one for his nurse. / Dear creatures: we can’t do without one, &c.
ref: 1828, “The Monkey; or, Dear Creatures, We Can’t Do Without Them”, in The Universal Songster; or, Museum of Mirth: Forming the Most Complete, Extensive, and Valuable Collection of Ancient and Modern Songs in the English Language: […], volume III, London: […] Jones and Co. […], page 98, column 1:
text: The gown of the small shopkeeper’s wife may have been made by the dressmaker of the duchess, and the former may be the more ladylike woman of the two; but being without the substance that warrants the show, she is a monkeyess.
ref: 1854 December, “Monkeyism”, in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox; […], page 749, column 1:
text: I say if this theory be correct, and man was originally a monkey and woman a monkeyess, then the job was not such a big thing after all—for any enterprising Yankee could, for a small consideration, have half a dozen generations of mixed varieties running in less than a month manufactured out of our Iowa soil.
ref: 1872 January 18, Paddy Miles, “Hygiene and Darwinianism”, in The Weekly Oskaloosa Herald, volume 22, number 19, Oskaloosa, Ia., page [2], column 5:
text: Darwin’s Monkey.—If Adam’s father was a monkey, / And Eve’s mother a monkeyess; / Then mastiffs firstly sprang from poodles, / A kennel of sprightly yankey doodles; / And that accounts for style and dress.
ref: 1873 October 18, J. W. B., “Quaint Home Proverbs”, in Appleton Crescent, volume XXI, number 18, Appleton, Wis., front page, column 8:
text: Monkeys are the best mimickers, the more civilized and refined imitate them in extracting labial sweetness from the monkeyesses.
ref: 1877 November 15, Amicus, “A Leatherwood Melange, Containing Little Sense and Much Nonsense, Wherein Ah Sin Portrays His Beauideal”, in The Pulaski Citizen, volume 19, number 46, Pulaski, Tenn., page [3], column 6:
text: It is these leaping tree-snakes probably which have given to monkeys their frantic terror at sight of a snake; and if in the anthropoid period any superior monkey and monkeyess had gained a securer place, defended by precipices from quadrupedal beasts, they might still have found one of these Leapers in their simial Eden.
ref: 1878 July 20, “African Magnates in London: The King of Bonny and the Liberian Premier Seeing European Civilization”, in The Daily Gazette, volume LXXXVI, number 292, Wilmington, Del., page [3], column 4:
text: One of the rajahs of India spent 100,000 rupees in the marriage of two monkeys. […] It was twelve days before the monkey and monkeyess were free from their round of gay attentions.
ref: 1894 January 3, “Rev. Dr. Talmage; The Brooklyn Divine’s Sunday Sermon. Subject: “The Burning of the Dead.””, in Marion Record, volume 4, number 1, Marion, N.C., page [3], column 3:
text: Three urchins were feeding a monkey and a monkeyess candy.
ref: 1894 June 25, “Found the Lost Link. The Schenley Park Reporter Establishes Mr. Darwin’s Theory. Gusy Like a U. S. Senator. Two Female Human Buzzards and a Juvenile Fox. Odious Comparisons at the Zoo.”, in The Pittsburgh Post, page 2, column 5:
text: Here is what Charles Dana Gibson, the famous artist, thinks of the American girl: “They are, beyond question, the loveliest of all their sex. Evolution has selected the best things for preservation as the man and woman have climbed up from the monkey and the monkeyess.[…]”
ref: 1911 April 3, “American Girls the Most Beautiful”, in The Hattiesburg News, volume XV, number 73, Hattiesburg, Miss., page three:
text: […] so after dinner, while the big man was otherwise engaged, O’Praty—who owned a pet monkeyess named Lutchmi—decided to pack her off that night to the temple.
ref: 1913, H. Hervey, “The Globe-Trotter”, in The European in India, London: Stanley Paul & Co […], page 93:
text: The face into which the baby monkey looks is such that one may fancy himself peering through the wrong end of a telescope at some feminine human being. The resemblance is still further emphasized by the whiteness of the little face, its smoothness and the pinkness of the cheeks. The secret of those roses? Rouge! Actually feminine rouge! And daintily pencilled eyebrows! And a beauty spot, scintillant below the coquettish feminine eyes! Talk about the eternal feminine! There it is, continued below—or is it above?—species. Does the monkeyess apply all this feminine beautifying? Here is a secret that in courtesy to the wife of the manager is not betrayed. But every one may do some guessing.
ref: 1915 January 17, “Monkey Mother Love. Rouged and Pencilled Little Foster-Parent Fondles Affectionate Baby at Society Circus.”, in The Los Angeles Times, part V, page 16, column 5:
text: Why should we monkey with the interstital^([sic]) glands of any monkey? What have we to do with foolish young monkey? Or with a monkey that may look, and be, Bolshevik? If it happened to be a decent, settled, middle-aged monkey, with about $100,000 in bonds of the Victory issue, we’d be glad to consider it. But with a fresh young monkey without even a cocoanut in the cache, and his fortune to make, all the while embarrassed by losing time in chasing from tree to tree after giggling and tittering young monkeyesses, not for us.
ref: 1921 January 8, “Russian Scientist Has New Scheme for Growing Young: By Grafting Interstitial Glands of Monkey Upon Old People, Dr. Voronoff Says That He Can Restore Feelings of Twenty-one Years of Age”, in St. Louis Saturday Night, volume one, number 34, page 5, column 5:
text: Somebody had left about a copy of a French romance called “Les Aventures de Polydore Marasquin.” It was of things that happened to a man in a kingdom of monkeys. It went very well, with an occasional use of the dictionary, until I discovered that the gentleman was about to engage himself to a very attractive monkeyess. I gave up the book in disgust, but I have since discovered that there have been lately several imitators of these adventures, which I think were written by an author named Léon Gozlan.
ref: 1922, Maurice Francis Egan, “My Boyhood Reading”, in Confessions of a Book-Lover, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, page 13:
text: […] man may admit that his grandfathers and grandmothers were mon[keys a]nd monkeyesses if he want^([sic]) to; that is his privilege.
ref: 1923 May 17, “ […] Advertiser and Mr. Bryan”, in The Progressive Age, Scottsboro, Ala.: James S. Benson, page [4]:
text: In a few weeks, Mike sickened and died and not long after Pete followed him on the long trail. Mona plainly showed her sorrow, according to the caretakers; she hasn’t been the same monkeyess since then.
ref: 1926 March 27, “Mona’s Mourning Days Are Over; She Cuts Monkey Shines Now”, in Kenosha Evening News, volume XXXII, number 121, Kenosha, Wis., page one, column 6:
text: Now the white man is a sort of extraordinary white monkey that, by cunning, has learnt lots of semi-magical secrets of the universe, and made himself boss of the show. Imagine a race of big white monkeys got up in fantastic clothes, and able to kill a man by hissing at him ; able to leap through the air in great hops, covering a mile in each leap; able to transmit his thoughts by a moment’s effort of concentration to some great white monkey or monkeyess, a thousand miles away: and you have, from our point of view, something of the picture that the Indian has of us.
ref: 1927, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, “The Mozo”, in Mornings in Mexico, London: Martin Secker, page 58:
text: Want to know what the people in Washington call the Capitol? “The Monkey House!” But it’s all in fun for they get considerable out of that monkey house and they do not care to antagonize the head monkies^([sic]) . . . and monkeyesses.
ref: 1933 April 13, G. C. T., “Little Stories About Washington”, in Tri-County Press, volume 77, number 23, Polo, Ill., page two, column 2:
text: “My dear, dear husband,” the monkeyess cried. “Why don’t you ever take me leaping from tree to tree any more?” Hamish, the monkey husband, gave a tremendous grunt. “What are you doing, dear husband?” “I’m trying to evolve.” The monkeyess made a face. “I bet it was that blonde that got over the line just before evolution stopped — I bet you want to be with her.[…]”
ref: 1939 February 14, John Rhodes Sturdy, “Under Our Roof”, in The Gazette, volume CLXVIII, number 38, Montreal, Que., page 3, column 2:
text: Next to a lamentable story concerning the untimely passing of Able, the Kansas-born monkeyess, who had no trouble with outer space but couldn’t survive the tender ministrations of an anesthetist, was another of doubtful “feeling” in our favorite Kansas newspaper.
ref: 1959 June 4, “NewsBeaMs”, in Shawnee News-Star, volume 65, number 41, Shawnee, Okla., page 10:
text: When they entered the monkeys’ meeting, / They both were given a fine greeting. / The man of virtue looked at them. / The emperor then questioned him / About his court – Now did he find / That it was lovely and refined. / To this the honest man returned, / That they were monkeys he discerned. / ‘Of me and of my wife, let’s hear – / And of my son, whom you see here – / What do you think? Now nothing hide!’ / ‘Here’s how it seems,’ the man replied. / ‘You’re monkey and she’s monkeyess – / Ugly, wicked, hideous. As for your son, all folks can see / He’s just a very small monkey.’ / Then to the comrade who was base / The monkey posed the selfsame case: / The same inquiry word for word.
ref: 1987, Marie de France, translated by Harriet Spiegel, Fables, Toronto, Ont.; Buffalo, N.Y.; London: University of Toronto Press, →ISBN, page 117, lines 27–45:
glosses: A female monkey.