puss

   Normally used to call a cat, but this word has been applied to girls and women since the seventeenth century. In third person reference or in direct address it is often coupled with words that imply slyness.

   In The Heir of Redclyffe, by Charlotte Yonge, a young man calls his sister ‘impertinent little puss’. Her father also calls her ‘puss’. There is a similar usage in Gone With The Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, where Scarlett O’Hara is often called ‘Puss’ by her father. ‘You little puss’ is used by a father to his daughter in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. In Boucicault’s London Assurance a man calls out to a woman visitor: ‘Come in, you mischievous puss.’

   The diminutive ‘pussy’ is also found. Dickens makes fun of such usage in Edwin Drood. ‘“I know that Pussy was looking for me.” “Do you keep a cat down there?” asked Mr Grewgious. Edwin coloured a little as he explained: “I call Rosa [his fiancée] Pussy…A pet name, sir,” he explained again.’ There is a further comment when ‘Pussy’s birthday’ is mentioned: ‘I’d Pussy you, young man, if I was Pussy, as you call her.’

   The modern slang meaning of ‘pussy’ would make vocative usage, other than in private, rather difficult. A reference to ‘pussy’ in vulgar speech is to the vulva or vagina, to sexual intercourse or to a woman considered purely as a sexual object. In The Sophomore, by Barry Spacks, there is an unusual example of a girl calling her boyfriend ‘poor Puss’. She equates it with ‘poor baby’.