flabby

Etymology

From a variant of flappy, from flap (“to hang loose”). Compare English dialectal flapsy (“flabby”), Middle Dutch flabbe (“a slap in the face; a fan-blade; a hair ribbon; a wagging tongue”), Middle Low German flabbe (“a gaping mouth; a chatterbox”), Danish flab (“the jaw; cheeks; a malapert”), Swedish flabb, fläff (“the hanging underlip of an animal; guffaw; driveller”), German Flabbe (“a gob; muzzle”).

adj

1. Yielding to the touch, and easily moved or shaken; hanging loose by its own weight; lacking firmness; flaccid.
   My attention was accidentally drawn to this aid, some five or six years ago, while attending a lady (multipara) in her confinement, who suffered from umbilical hernia, with large flabby abdomen. 1867-12-28, John Wades, “External Manual Pressure during Labour”, in The British Medical Journal, volume 2, page 601
   The strings of some violins when up to pitch are loose and flabby; some are very taut and hard. 1961, The Violin Makers' Journal - Volume 5, page 71
   Chassis of 1950s-1970s bikes are flabby tubular structures, often weak to the point of lacking straight-line stability! 2008, Kevin Cameron, Sportbike Performance Handbook, page 135
2. (of wine) Having a slight lack of acidity; having mild sweetness.
   A flabby wine might be described as a wine in which nothing stands out. 1996, Emile Peynaud, Jacques Blouin, The Taste of Wine: The Art Science of Wine Appreciation, page 229
   An extremely hot region will give you flabby wine. 2008, Thomas Pellechia, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Starting and Running a Winery, page 103
3. (of writing, etc.) overwrought.
   As you revise, focus on eliminating flabby expressions. This takes conscious effort. As one expert copyeditor observed, “Trim sentences, like trim bodies, usually require far more effort than flabby ones. 2014, Mary Ellen Guffey, Dana Loewy, Business Communication: Process and Product, page 178
4. (mathematics) Which forms a surjection from the domain to every open subset of the codomain.
   a flabby sheaf on a paracompact space