something i’ve always liked
Plain as an old-fashioned synonym for ugly (“She’s terribly plain!”). I don’t even get the sense that it was being used euphemistically, either — which reinforces a weird idea I have of an Olden Times where everything was more or less pleasant, or at least inert. So plain was a genuine insult in those days because the Austen-era attractiveness scale didn’t go below “neutral”. Like, that was the worst thing you could be back then: not actively beautiful.
