pneumatic [E17th] This comes from Greek pneumatikos, from pneuma ‘wind’. Greek pnein ‘breathe’ is the base. Because the Greeks felt there was a strong association between breath and the soul pneumatic is used in New Testament Greek to mean ‘spiritual’, and this is the sense first recorded in English. It came to be used for things inflated with air in the middle of the 19th century, and this opened the way to the development of pneumatic to describe a well-rounded female form. Rather surprisingly, T. S. Eliot is the first recorded user of this sense: ‘Uncorseted her friendly bust / Gives promise of pneumatic bliss’ (Whispers of Immortality 1919).