"Pleasure is to women what the sun is to the flower; if moderately enjoyed, it beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves; if immoderately, it withers, etiolates, and destroys."

Wrote Charles Caleb Colton in "Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words : Addressed to Those who Think," in 1820:

That's quoted at the OED definition for "etiolate,"  which means "To lessen or undermine the strength, vigour, or effectiveness of (a quality, group, movement, etc.); to have a weakening effect upon." 

That's the second meaning. The oldest meaning is about plants: "To cause (a plant) to develop with reduced levels of chlorophyll (esp. by restricting light), causing bleaching of the green tissues, elongated internodes, weakened stems, deficiencies in vascular structure, and abnormally small leaves."

You take the plant out of the sun to etiolate it, but the woman needs to be kept out of the sun, lest she etiolate. So said Colton, anyway. He was one of the "boys" referenced in the more recent aphorism: "Some boys take a beautiful girl and hide her away from the rest of the world/I want to be the one to walk in the sun...." The sun, Colton. 

But C.C. Colton is long gone. He died in 1832 — forever excluded from the sun — died of suicide, committed because, we're told, he had an illness that required surgery, and he dreaded surgery.

I'm reading about the word "etiolated" because I used it yesterday: "I'm collecting examples of this avoidance of the word 'woman' and the resultant etiolation of speech."

I don't think I'd ever felt moved to use that word before, and I actually used it in conversation before writing it. Had I ever spoken it before in my life? Hard to remember what I've said in all my long years of walking in the sun and hidden away, but I can say that in the 18 years of this blog, I'd never used it before, though I had twice quoted somebody else's use:

1. Here, I quote Oliver Wainwright, The Guardian's architecture critic, criticizing the ridiculously tall and skinny new skyscrapers in NYC: "Poking up above the Manhattan skyline like etiolated beanpoles, they seem to defy the laws of both gravity and commercial sense."

2. Here, I quote John Lanchester in The New York Review of Books, on the topic of "The Time Machine": "Its main argumentative point comes when [H.G.] Wells travels to the far future and finds that humanity has evolved into two different species, the brutish, underground-dwelling Morlocks and the etiolated, effete, surface-living Eloi." 

In both of those quotes — and in the Charles Caleb Colton quote — the supposedly etiolated thing is getting plenty of sun! But the etiolation that's done to plants is to keep them out of the sun. 

So how do we weaken ourselves — figuratively — with more sun or less sun? Think about: hiding women away within their traditional household function, deciding whether or not to let a newly conceived human being ever emerge into the light, weakening speech by keeping the word "women" out of the public discourse, and releasing a Supreme Court opinion draft out into the sunlight.

ADDED: Oh, there is one more use of "etiolate" in the archive, a quoted from "How To Write a (Good) Sentence/Adam Haslett on Stanley Fish":

"If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest [Hemingway] walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead."