the.com/swoon
the body's dramatic exit from a moment too overwhelming to survive standing up.
means To faint or nearly faint from intense emotion, or—more loosely—to be overwhelmed with delight or longing.
from From Old English 'geswogen,' meaning 'in a faint' or 'senseless,' the past participle of a verb 'swogan' that hovered around the sense of overpowering or suffocating. The noun and modern verb crystallized in Middle English as 'swoun,' and over centuries it drifted from the literal medical collapse toward the softer, romance-novel kind of falling—where the swooner usually makes sure there's a couch nearby.
- old meaning
- Once meant to actually faint dead away
- the cause
- Blood briefly abandons the brain for elsewhere
- victorian fashion
- Tight corsets made fainting a literal hazard
- fainting couch
- Furniture invented expressly to catch swooners
- modern use
- Now mostly metaphorical, thankfully fewer head injuries
for instance
jane austen's heroines — elizabeth bennet, emma woodhouse, catherine morland all famously swoon in novels written 1811-1817