I want to write about one thing, and can do so while writing about something someone's asked me to write about, but:
I will not get sidetracked into writing about every kind of clothing.
I will not get sidetracked into writing about every kind of clothing.
I will not get sidetracked into writing about every kind of clothing.
....
OK, here we go.
Kate e-mailed to request some coverage of
pants,
trousers and
slacks. In BrE,
pants refers to underpants, which sometimes leads to sub-hilarity when an American says something like
I look good in pants.
Pants is a generic term—those for women can also be called
knickers or
panties.
Pants has another life as a term of derogatory evaluation. Better Half has obliged us with an example:
Superman Returns was completely pants—and he even wears them on the outside.
(For those interested in Greek terms for odd turns of phrase, that's a
zeugma, though some would prefer you to call it a
syllepsis.)
The BrE word for the bottom half of a suit is
trousers—indeed British women wear
trouser suits, while their American counterparts wear
pantsuits.
Trousers is understood, but not much used, in AmE. I'd certainly never apply the word to womenswear in AmE, but do so easily in my approximation of BrE. In AmE,
trousers is an old-fashioned, kind of funny word.
What about
slacks? BH and I were just saying the other day that we thought we'd only use
slacks as an AmE word for certain types of women's trousers. The very same evening, we were watching an episode from the first
(BrE) series/(AmE) season of the very
clever BBC comedy
The Smoking Room, in which a male character's trousers are referred to as
slacks. So it looks like BH and I don't know nuffin. (On the positive side, I can start to cite watching comedy DVDs as an important research activity.) Nevertheless, we both think of
slacks as a word that's more at home in our mothers' or grandmothers' vocabularies.
But all of this talk just gets me further from what
I wanted to talk about. I mean, we're entering the glorious season of
Lynneukah (the festival of Lynne), so I should get the space for my big rant here: WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH WOMEN'S TROUSERS/PANTS? I've worn skirts through several years of the low-waisted fashion, because no one makes a woman-shaped trouser anymore. They make trouser legs with something to hold them together. Even the ones that call themselves
natural waist (I'm talking to
YOU, Boden!) reach nowhere near that narrower part of me between my hips and my ribs. So this year (after some rumblings in this direction last year), the fashion mags proclaimed that high-waisted trousers are back! In fact, they seem to believe they are ubiquitous:
And for anyone tired of the smock, and the baby doll, and the high-waist trouser, and sick to death of wearing nothing but grey, or black, or shell (fashion speak for off-white), then I am afraid that next summer you will be disappointed. —The Daily Mail, 18 September 2006
Where on earth are all these high-waisted trousers? This summer I've returned five so-called items to mail order houses, and found just one pair
in the High Street (AmE = 'on Main Street', but since there are no
(AmE) stores/BrE shops on Main Street, USA anymore, the translation doesn't really work). Which brings me to the heart of my rant. I found another pair of trousers-that-fit-women-with-hips-and-waist in the US in March and both of these pairs of trousers/pants are made of (it makes my skin crawl even typing this) p-o-l-y-e-s-t-e-r. Reader, I am so desperate that I bought them. And by the second wearing, each of them was covered with (here comes the big BrE/AmE distinction that I wanted to get to!) (AmE)
PILLS/(BrE)
BOBBLES.
BH tells me that I need to get a
Remington Fuzz-Away. But then again he is also the man who just said "If I had a band I'd call it
Victor Kiam's Love Child."