My office recently started up a book club, which is awesome, even if that means I'm somehow in three book clubs. (Oops.) We're currently reading Wolf Hall, which is about Thomas Cromwell. So far, I'm not a huge fan of the writing style--historical fiction in present tense is a bit silly--but, I'll withhold further judgment until I have finished the book.In reading the book, I learned a new word: uxorious. It means excessive fondness for one's wife. Naturally, I turned to Google to find out what the comparable word is for excessive fondness for one's husband.
First, I learned that the top autocomplete when you type "excessive" is "burping," which is amusing. WebMD is very reassuring that burping, like flatulence, is natural, if a bit uncomfortable or embarrassing at times. However, I've read Mary Roach's Gulp, so I am privy* to the many ways in which gas can go terribly wrong.
More to the point, however, I learned that while "uxorious" is a relatively common word, the equivalent for excessive fondness for one's husband, "maritorious," is exceedingly rare. That says to me that, at least historically, our society believes a wife's love is almost never "too much," whereas a husband can love his wife too much. That's lame. I think we should stick to a gender- and relationship-neutral version of this word--"obsequious" comes to mind--because love for one's partner, by a man or a woman, should not be immediately implicated as a sign of weakness.
My diatribe is probably unnecessary, as "uxorious" seems to have fallen out of contemporary usage, likely for the same reasons as those I have raised. That being said, my spell checker tells me that "uxorious" is a word, but "maritorious" is not. Stop being so gender normative, spell check!
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* Pun intended, of course.
