Loose, open, distinct from each other.
More than twelve hundred years ago, the fish we now know as the salmon was called, in Old English, lax. Relatives of this Old English word exist in other languages to this day, including the German lacks, the Yiddish Ms, the Swedish, Danish, and Dutch lax, and the Russian losos. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, lax developed a rival due to the introduction of the French name of the fish, samoun. By the seventeenth century, the word lax had been so overtaken by samoun—which had by then acquired the spelling salmon—that no one really remembered what lax had once referred to; one writer in 1656 knew that the lax was some sort of fish, but he had a monstrously exaggerated impression of its size, claiming that the lax grew to twenty-four feet in length. Eventually, in the eighteenth century, lax dropped out of English altogether. Ironically, however, the death of lax permitted its eventual resurrection in the late nineteenth century: it was then that English cooks borrowed the long-forgotten lax from Norwegian and applied it to a specific kind of northern salmon, a name it still possesses. Yet another form of the word appeared in 1941 when English took the Yiddish word for salmon, laks, respelt it as lox, and bestowed it upon a kind of smoked salmon usually served with a bagel.
Of rather floppy habit, for instance Philadelphus mexicanus, the opposite of upright or stiff.
Weak-stemmed and consequently of rather floppy habit, for instance Clianthus puniceus, the opposite of erect or stiff.