Interesting figurative use here of a word I had to look up:

In recent decades, most models and actresses have been enviably slender, but the current obsessive attention to physical minutiaee--the difference, say, between being thin or ultra-thin, or ultra-thin and etiolated--is something new ...
- Wall Street Journal, Sept. 26, 2006, D8/1

etiolate
1. to cause (a plant) to whiten or grow pale by excluding light.
2. to cause to become weakened or sickly; drain of color or vigor.

I haven't heard of that word. Is it more a plant word? It almost sounds like the plant equivalent of "asthenic."

Yes, Kalleh, etiolated is a botanical word pertaining to the white color of a plant grown without sunlight. The earliest quote in the OED Online (under etiolate) is from Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin's grandfather) in 1791: "Celery blanched or etiolated for the table by excluding the light from it." I don't know if he coined the term or not, but it's from the French étioler.

It originally referred to the white color of the plant, not to its other characteristics. But, as time went on, etiolated was used to refer to such a plant's other characteristics, such as its weak, spindly growth. And it was used figuratively to refer to people.

Charlotte Bronte used it figuratively in Jane Eyre: "Next morning I had the pleasure of encountering him; left a bullet in one of his poor etiolated arms, feeble as the wing of a chicken in the pip, and then thought I had done with the whole crew." (Chapter 11).

Aesthenic, first recorded by OED Online from 1789, has nothing to do with color, at least directly, but means "Of, pertaining to, or characterized by asthenia; weak, debilitated; weakening."

It was used by W. J. H. Sprott in 1925 to describe physiques : "Three ever-recurring principal types of physique have emerged..which we will call ‘asthenic’, ‘athletic’, and ‘pyknic’."

I had to look up pycnic:

quote:

In Kretschmer's theory of human physical and corresponding temperamental types, designating a stocky physique with a rounded body and head, thickset trunk, and a tendency to fat, usu. accompanied by a cycloid temperament; also absol., a person belonging to this type. Phr. pyknic practical joke (see quot. 1964).

1964 L. J. BISCHOF Interpreting Personality Theories (1970) xi. 431 Pyknic practical joke (PPJ).., the PPJ refers to a person who has a muscular mesomorphic body in adolescence but in later life balloons out into obesity to become an endomorph.

Tinman

This message has been edited. Last edited by: tinman,

Thanks, Tinman, for all that research. I should have been clear about my reference to "asthenia." I only mentioned it because Shu's description of an etiolated plant reminded me of a very sick and debilitated person, which we describe as "asthenic." The relation to color is that asthenic patients are often pale, as well as thin, weak and generally sickly. Doesn't that remind you of an etiolated plant?