"Pluck-haired"?

[The Troubadour]

What's a "pluck-haired" person? How does that look like? Is it the same as having a shaved head?

[Jack Squat]

I think it roughly means "tidy" or "well groomed", but I could be way off. It's not a common idiom, can you remember the context you heard it in?

[Nix Nihila]

It is not something I have ever heard of before. A quick google search reveals that is not something other people have heard of either. In fact, the two most relevant results appear to have been started by you yourself (I'm assuming that you also post on the WotC forum). Jack's suggestion makes sense, but I agree that we need context.

[The Troubadour]

It's from the book "Hotel on the Corner of a Bitter and Sweet".

"A girl, probably in the same grade, about his height, hidden behind long bangs and the black strands of hair that framed her face. She sprayed the trays with hot steaming water and put them in a dish rack, one by one. As she slowly turned towards Henry, he noticed her slender cheekbones, her perfect skin, smooth and lacking in the freckles that mottled the other girls' faces at the normally all-white school. But most of all, he noticed her soft chestnut-brown eyes.
(...)
The pluck-haired girl whispered, 'I'm Keiko.'"

[Nix Nihila]

Maybe she plucks her eyebrows? It is rather odd.

[llamamushroom]

Yeah, that context destroys what I was reading into it (plucked hens have little bits sticking up all over, so I thought a straggly not-quite-bald).

By the looks of things, Mr Squat's is the best answer for the context.

[NerfTW]

It's not entirely unlikely that the author simply made up a word or thought it existed, and the editor didn't notice.

[Brother Oni]

The pluck-haired girl whispered, 'I'm Keiko.'"

I suspect the answer is in the girl's name - she's Japanese.

In feudal times, the fashion was for Japanese women to shave their eyebrows and blacken their teeth, but I'm guessing that the story is set in more modern times.

Nix Nihila's suggestion is accurate - she plucks her eyebrows, so they're sparse and well groomed. As an example of this, use google images to look at traditional geisha.

Edit: I've heard of the term used towards men as well, which usually means they're bald (not shaven-headed).

[The Troubadour]

Thanks a lot for the help, guys! :-D

[Xuc Xac]

If the book was scanned, it could be an OCR error for "black-haired".

[The Troubadour]

Hey there, guys! Just wanted to thank you all again. :-) "Pluck-haired" really does mean a woman who plucks her eyebrows (although apparently there is a different, a lot raunchier, meaning for gay men).

If anyone's curious, the book was written by a Chinese-American author whose first language isn't English, which accounts for some of the odd sentence structures in the book.

[Dr.Epic]

It's not entirely unlikely that the author simply made up a word or thought it existed, and the editor didn't notice.

What, when has any author ever done that? What would Shakespeare think of it?:smallwink:

I guess based on everyone else in means plucked eyebrows.