girlery
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: girleries
Etymology: From girl + -ery.
Senses: examples: text: W. Hazlitt is in town. I took him to see a very pretty girl professedly, where there were two young girls—the very head and sum of the girlery was two young girls —they neither laughed nor sneered nor giggled nor whispered—but they were young girls—and he sat and frowned blacker and blacker, indignant that there should be such things as youth and beauty, till he tore me away before supper in perfect misery, and owned he could not bear young girls; they drove him mad.
ref: 1806, Charles Lamb, Letter to Wordsworth:
text: There are lassies and leddies in Scotland, my dear James, of whom you know nothing— houses where, it is obvious from his writings, the author of Modern Athens must have had his howf;— and really, when one considers from what originals he painted his portraits of Edina's girlery, the wonder is that his daubings are not even more disgusting than they are ; but the likenesses are strong, although his nymphs must have been unsteady sitters.
ref: 1892, John Wilson, Noctes Ambrosianae - Volume 1, page 196:
text: Was there more unnatural a daughter in Christendom and Girlery, Mother's rolling eyes besought me to give her to understand.
ref: 1987, Mid-American Review - Volumes 7-8, page 43:
glosses: Girlhood.
examples: text: How the white-robed “girleries" perk and crow, as Haunting the blue ribbon of many honors he marches down the chapel steps and out, while fond parents and a German band shower their plaudits of congratulation on this college man.
ref: 1903, Hamilton Literary Magazine - Volume 38, page 121:
text: There is enough girlery in Sayers' presentation of her protagonists to make the indictment plausible:
ref: 1988 Fall, Valerie Pitt, “Dorothy Sayers: The Predicaments of Women”, in Literature and History, volume 14, number 2:
text: I lie hid and lurk in wait for the giggling girleries and leap out and shout and scatter them like chickens from the boot to the safe and flying four winds.
ref: 2005, John Engels, Recounting the Seasons: Poems, 1958-2005, page 86:
text: I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon
ref: 2011, Gary Lutz, “This is Nice of You”, in Continent, volume 1, number 1:
glosses: Girlishness; something or some collection of things associated with girls, or a girl herself, viewed as the embodiment of girlishness.
Synonyms: girldom