I was thinking about 'feisty'.

You know I got through all my childhood and three years at college without knowing that word at all.

The first place I went to teach was in Birmingham - England's second city, and there were lots of 1st and 2nd generation Jamaican kids at my school. They used the word a lot. They pronounced it 'face-ty' and with them it meant: having a lot of cheek, a lot of 'face' - so much, you were likely to get it smacked!

Then suddenly the word started to get into common parlance, meaning gutsy and determined. But I believe it was a Jamaican thing that it suddenly grew VERY popular as a word.

Anyway; there's John Masefield using it, in this poem, in 1921.