What a catastrophe!
Ha!
Weak like a woman or scared like a cat. Wrong in both cases as you really don’t want piss either one of them off.
What about when a woman refers to herself as a pussy? The other day I was talking to a woman about competing in an endurance event, and she said she doubted she’d ever do it because she’s a pussy. I doubt she meant that she wouldn’t do it because she’s a woman; rather that she was too weak-willed.
Pusillanimous isn’t ancient, but it is from the Latin and also from the 16th century. As I understand it, the pu- words in Latin that indicate smallness or various terms for children come from an Indo-European root that means something like ‘you put food in it’.