IWHBYD

"I think so."

Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. "Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending."

"Snap ending." Mildred nodded.

"Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume."

"Leave the gun, take the...?"

Pusillanimous comes from Latin pusillus ("very small") + animus ("spirit, courage"), literally meaning "small-spirited" or cowardly.

Pussy has a much more complicated etymology. Historically, it was a pet name for a cat (attested since the 1500s), and later became a slang term for female genitalia (attested by at least the late 1600s).

When pussy came to mean "a coward" (mainly in American English in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), linguists disagree about the precise pathway:

It may have developed from the sense of "cat" (suggesting someone timid or easily frightened, like a scared cat).

It may have been influenced by the vulgar term for female genitalia, reflecting sexist stereotypes that associate femininity with weakness.

Some scholars think both meanings reinforced each other.

What there is no evidence for is that the cowardly sense is derived from "pusillanimous."

The resemblance between pussy and pusillanimous is almost certainly coincidental. Etymologists do not trace one word to the other, and major dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster do not derive pussy from pusillanimous.