Excellent, thank you all for the good advice.

(BTW, thanks for saying "when" rather than "if", Deb! You just made me grin.)

Can someone with access to a better dictionary than I have get me dates for the following words?

• hussy
• strumpet
• uppity

I really should add a good dictionary to my wish list.

I don't have a date but my dictionary says that hussy is from Middle English "huswife".

It says that "strumpet" is also Middle English but connected with OF (Old French?) strupe from L stuprum - dishonor.

Both of my dictionaries just say that "uppity" is colloquial.

I'm pretty sure I can get by with strumpet, but I'm not sure that uppity existed, nor that hussy had acquired its slutty definition, in 1809. Which is too bad, especially WRT uppity. There's no other single word that conveys the same meaning.

Susan, this is a great online etymology dictionary. I didn't check all of the words, but "uppity" is definitely out:

uppity: 1880, originally used by blacks of other blacks felt to be too self-assertive.

The parallel British variant uppish (1678) originally meant "lavish;" the sense of "conceited, arrogant" being first recorded 1734.

So...maybe that's a possibility?

Okay, I lied. Here are the others:

hussy,1530: "mistress of a household, housewife," alt. of M.E. husewif, from huse "house" + wif "wife." Gradually broadened to mean "any woman or girl," and by 1650 was being applied to "a woman or girl who shows casual or improper behavior," and a general derogatory sense had overtaken the word by 19c. "It is common to use housewife in a good, and huswife or hussy in a bad sense." [Johnson]

strumpet: c.1327, of uncertain origin. One theory connects it with L. stuprata, fem. pp. of stuprare "have illicit sexual relations with."

Looks like both of those would be fine.

Thanks, Kristin! I've bookmarked that site for future reference. And "hussy" and "strumpet" stay, but "uppity little baggage" is becoming "shameless little baggage who wouldn't keep to her place."

No worries, Susan!

So now I have another dumb question for the writing hivemind. I'm familiar with screenwriting and novel submission format, but how should I format a magazine submission?

Double-spaced? Single? Left-justified, indented paragraphs or straight justified with extra spaces between each one? I want to make sure this looks completely professional.

Definitely double space...margins? We don't need no stinking, no, actually my betas have fixed them for me every time.

Uppity has always struck me as purely an American colloquialism; I don't think I ever heard it anywhere but in the US.

Strumpet is really, really old; I seem to recall something in Francois Villon that translated later to hussy, but I could be way off.