On the other hand, I am in good male company for being completely mystified by peplum only to find it's another word for "overskirt."
I'm also in the 1/8 of all men in not recognizing the word shemale, though if wikipedia is right it's just she-male missing the hyphen? Perhaps I was primed by all of the fashion words but I read it with a french pronunciation...
1: e.g. https://poets.org/poem/because-i-could-not-stop-death-479 (written by a woman)
I got most of the women ones a lot are clothes/fashion/hair. I guess gay helps get a larger vocabulary ;)
- peplum - late 17th century: via Latin from Greek peplos .
- boucle - late 19th century: French, literally ‘buckled, curled’.
- pessary - late Middle English: from late Latin pessarium, based on Greek pessos ‘oval stone’ (used in board games).
- doula - 1960s: modern Greek, from Greek doulē ‘female slave’.
- chignon - late 18th century: from French, originally ‘nape of the neck’, based on Latin catena ‘chain’.
- tulle - early 19th century: from Tulle, a town in SW France, where it was first made.
etc
Doula is one I would have never known had it not been for the pregnant women in my life.
They're still English.
It's a little interesting how many from both sides of the list are loanwords, though - on the "male" side there's examples like howitzer, aileron, strafe and katana. I wonder if there's an effect here because loanwords are harder to learn?