The applicability to Mrs Bennet is questionable at best. I wasn't aware that one of the attributes of the word was youth - I've always heard it applied equally to silly women regardless of age (and once to a man) - it was a word my mother used (she had a very large vocabulary, which made her the family Scrabble champion by a huge margin; sometimes the scores of the second and third-place players didn't add up to hers, which was demoralizing). When I saw the 1995 P&P, I thought of that word for the portrayal of Mrs Bennet.
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