David Ritchie: >>So which came first, do you think, hostility to the "supersized Rubens" >>habitus, or some weird intolerance of pears' form? J. Evans: >I was wondering that too! I suspect "pear-shaped" meaning "gone wrong" >post-dates "pear-shaped women". For the record, M. Quinion suggests -- in his webpage (below) -- it's RAF slang -- he refers to 'Oxford Dictionaries', but at least the online OED does not seem to recognise the meaning, so maybe he has another specific Oxford dictionary in mind? Cheers, JL _www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-pea2.htm_ (http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-pea2.htm) "It isnâ??t immediately obvious how the literal meaning turned into the figurative one, though we do know that it started to appear in the 1960s. A common explanation, the one accepted by Oxford Dictionaries, is that it comes from Royal Air Force slang. However, nobody there or anywhere else seems to know why. Some say that it may have been applied to the efforts of pilots to do aerobatics, such as loops. It is notoriously difficult (I am told) to get manoeuvres like this even roughly circular, and instructors would describe the resulting distorted route of the aircraft as pear-shaped. Iâ??ve not seen firm evidence to convince me of this explanation, which sounds a little far-fetched, but thatâ??s the best I can do!" ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html