Growing up in the South, I was always told that ‘the vapors’ was bad gas and that proper young ladies called it ‘the vapors’ as a way to excuse themselves from the room.
In Alabama older women say they had to fluff.
What’s up with that?
An archaic term for certain mental and / or physical states, such as hysteria, mania, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, fainting, mood swings or PMS, ascribed primarily to women and thought to be caused by internal emanations; see also female hysteria.