Entertainment gossip and news from Newsweek's network of contributors
Swifties can't stop talking about Cara Delevingne spilling the tea on her friendship with Taylor Swift — but many are also confused about the word choice she used to describe the 14-time Grammy winner.
As fans know, Delevingne, 32, has been friends with Swift, 34, for over a decade — even famously starring alongside the pop superstar in her "Bad Blood" music video in 2014. So it was no surprise that the singer — who is known for comforting her celeb pals after their splits — took the model in when she was going through "a really horrible breakup" of her own.
"[Taylor] let me live with her [in the aftermath of the split]," Delevingne told comedian and die-hard Swift fan Nikki Glaser in a new piece for Interview magazine.
"We're very different people," the British actress added. "She's very homely, because she looked after me so well, but we got into some — not trouble, but I definitely took her for a bit of a wild ride. Just to get her to blush would be great."
While fans were loving the idea of Delevingne and Swift getting causing mayhem, they were also left wondering what exactly Delevingne meant by "homely" — which, in the U.S., is defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary as "plain or unattractive in appearance."
"I assume Cara didn't actually call Taylor 'homely'???" one person asked via X (formerly known as Twitter).
"'she's very homely' i think that means something else 😭," another ventured.
"I don't think homely means what she thinks it means lol," a third person wrote.
"I think she meant to say home-y," another fan guessed in a Facebook comment. "If you read the article, homely isn't the correct word for what she was trying to convey. And, obviously Taylor isn't homely."
Overall, it appears as if all of the commenters who thought Delevingne's U.K. roots played a part — "She's British and likely not aware of the typical meaning of homely to Americans," one person wrote on Facebook — were right.
"Homely is used in Britain to mean 'simple,' 'unpretentious,' 'nothing fancy,'" scholar Norman W. Schur wrote in English English, according to the L.A. Times, which once dedicated an entire article to the difference between the U.S. and U.K. definitions of the word. "A homely woman in Britain is a friendly, unassuming, domestic type. It is quite possible to be attractive and homely in Britain."
English (US) ·