Entry: distaff (adj.)
In context: "Later blacklisted off both the Virginia Slims and Family Circle professional distaff circuits after trying to organize the circuits' more politically rabid and unwrapped players into a sort of radical post-feminist grange that would compete only in pro tournaments organized, subsidized, refereed, overseen, and even attended and cartridge-distributed exclusively to not only women or homosexual women, but only by, for, and to registered members of the infamously unpopular early-Interdependence-era Female Objectification Prevention and Protest Phalanx..."
Definition: a. As the type of women's work or occupation.
Other: Above is only one of the definitions. I'm curious how it's connected to the etymology:
Etymology: Old English distæf , supposed to be for dis- or dise-stæf , the second element being staff n.1; dis or dise is apparently identical with Low German diesse (Bremen Wbch.) a bunch of flax on a distaff, and connected with dize v., dizen v. ‘to put tow on a distaffe’ (Ray).
SNOOT score: 2
Page: 307
Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Definitive Jest is a vocabulary-building and SNOOT-approved word-of-the-day blog centered around David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
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