I'm reading The London Times — "How to have a holiday with your teenager — without arguments/Sun, sea… and sulking? Teens can test your patience when you go away. The psychologist Dr Beth Mosley gives her advice" — so I need to be on the lookout for Britishism.
Sometimes they're not so obvious. I was all, what's wrong with 3 pairs of pants? Too many pants — right? — so maybe there aren't enough shirts? But, no, "forgetting pants isn’t catastrophic"? How has the kid forgotten pants if he brought 3 pairs of pants? How long is this vacation? Oh, I get it... pants. When they say "pants," they mean underpants.
"Dogsbody" you can see is something they must say that we don't say, but "pants" flew under the radar.
Let's check out "pants." The "chiefly U.S." meaning goes first: "Originally (colloquial): pantaloons. Later: trousers of any kind...." The first 3 historical quotes:
1835 In walked my friend—pumps and tight pants on—white gloves and perfumed handkerchief. Southern Literary Messenger vol. 1 358
1840 Standing on one leg three hours, to show off new-touch strapped pants. E. A. Poe, Peter Pendulum in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine February 88
1846 The thing named ‘pants’ in certain documents, A word not made for gentlemen, but ‘gents’. O. W. Holmes, Rhymed Lesson 515
The British meaning is relegated to definition #3: "1880–Chiefly British. (Men's or women's) underpants. New English Dictionary (OED first edition) (1904) describes this usage as ‘colloquial and “shoppy.”’ Shoppy!
One of the quotes here is from 1999 in Watt's On, from the Heriot-Watt University Students' Association: "The University seems to be asking us to choose between wearing no underwear..and wearing damp pants."
So vacation mom who doesn't want to be the dogsbody can let teenboy figure out what his choices are.
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45 comments:
If “pants” means underwear, then what do they call pants? And if they also call pants pants, then the problem is the writing, not the understanding.
My British paternal grandfather (born in 1901 in Yorkshire, and, later, in adulthood a naturalized American) used this term frequently as I was growing up--and, I assume, when my dad his brothers were growing up. "Your grandmother is not the dogsbody! Get in there and help her" would be an example. As an aside, he prided himself on having mastered American writing and spelling, and you could see from his writings where he switched from one to the other depending on the audience.
Thanks for the wave of nostalgia! Grandpa died in 1977, but I still think of him often, even after all of these years. He's why I can speak and read British slang, at least the old-timey type.
Heh. Grandpa married a 100% Irish lass, the daughter of two Irish immigrants, who had the gift of gab, as they say. Language was lively in that household!
Go Comanche. It’s his vacation, too
A dogsbody is a servant of a servant. In the third "Blackadder" series, Edmund Blackadder is valet to the Prince of Wales. Baldrick is still Blackadder's servant, but since Blackadder is himself a servant, Baldrick is a dogsbody.
Dogsbody's body.
Comanche? No. Commando!
Just about anybody can go for days on a single pair of underpants with a paper towel fore and aft.
It's all a dog's breakfast.
"If “pants” means underwear, then what do they call pants?"
Trousers.
"Go Comanche."
I think it's commando. Unless you're planning a raid on your neighbors.
The teen want to... set loose on a wild, untamed continent
Pants, trousers, slacks, breaches. They all appears to be plural words, with no singular antecedent.
@Tim Trousers.
Commando is the more common term for freeballin. Comanche is the better term.
Money Manger said...
"..Pants, trousers, slacks, breaches. They all appears to be plural words, with no singular antecedent.."
yes they do have.. Think "leggings" as opposed to a legging
we just don't use the singular, because it'd be weird to walk around with only one leg clad
"The teen (sic) want to... set loose on a wild, untamed continent"
And then the explorers of the untamed just want to come home to a refrigerator full of food and to clean pants and trousies to wear to the pub and don't expect wild boy to hang out his swimsuit to dry.
For years, while the kids were little, I would have them pack according to the packing lists on the family management app I used (a hot weather and a cold weather one). Eventually I just told them to pack, and because they'd been packing for themselves (with the lists) for so long, they knew what to do.
But my favorite packing story is from a Christmas trip when our youngest was about 4, too young to read the lists for himself such that I was still packing his clothes for him. In an effort to start training him up in the way that he should go, we told him he could pack his own carry-on backpack.
Well. He was going through an Indiana Jones phase - had received several themed items, including a fedora, for Christmas. He hoisted his backpack onto the conveyer belt at TSA, and off it went into the machine.
The operator paused the belt, ran it backwards, stared again at the screen, called over a colleague. They asked whose bag it was; I acknowledged that it was my kid's, and they asked if they could search it. First step: they felt around it on the outside.
The crack of a whip! And then, the stirring first notes of the Raiders of the Lost Ark theme: dumm-da-dum-dummm, dumm-da-dummm... The TSA guys and the people waiting in line, eyeing the little kid in the faux leather jacket and fedora, all cracked up. The TSA guys opened the backpack and started pulling things out: first, the whip with battery-operated sound effects, the button of which they'd pressed while manipulating the backpack. Then, another plain old whip, also faux leather. Then, our son's beloved "bloody knife," a Halloween prop from a couple of months earlier that had enchanted him so much that I couldn't resist getting it for him (his birthday is right before Halloween): a plastic dagger with about a six-inch "blade," which was covered with a transparent soft plastic layer that filled with fake blood when you topped it downward, like those baby doll bottles. (The night he got it, he asked me if he could "cuddle with his bloody knife.") He was surely going to be the most heavily armed four-year-old on our flight.
"Pants, trousers, slacks, breaches. They all appears to be plural words, with no singular antecedent."
The word you're looking for is "breeches," not "breaches."
A teenager today should use AI to plan how to pack. He can prioritize packing light and fitting everything into a backpack and figure out how to wash things that will dry overnight. Mother should point him in the direction of becoming competent not try to save him from mistakes.
There's also YouTube. I know there are good videos where young men show how incredibly little you can pack. You really shouldn't need more than 3 pairs of underpants. That's 4 counting what you'd be wearing. It would be easy to hand wash 3 pairs of underpants in the hotel sink every third day. It would be easy, in fact, to pack NO underpants and wear 1 pair if it dries overnight after you wash it in the sink.
""..Pants, trousers, slacks, breaches. They all appears to be plural words, with no singular antecedent.."
I've seen "pant" — maybe back in the 1970s and it was "shoppy."
When I worked in the juniors department of a department store — a summer job — there was a very popular brand called PantHer. You were expected to experience that as a delightful pun.
Can't be a dogsbody with no pants.
Obama ate a dog's body.
Dogsbody Cologne
The hardest working scent in the business.
Indianism
Drawers" can mean pieces of furniture used to store apparel, or it can be a vintage slang term for underwear
Difference between an ambassador and a hot dog: An ambassador wears full dress, a hot dog just pants.
A dogsbody.
What did Kristi Noem have to dispose of after her psychotic episode in a South Dakota gravel pit?
Dog pants cools body
Breechclout for breechless Comanche
"The term sans-culottes (French for "without breeches") refers to the radical, working-class partisans of the French Revolution. Unlike the wealthy elite who wore fashionable silk knee-breeches (culottes), these commoners wore practical long trousers (pantalons), becoming the driving force of the revolution's most radical phase." - wikipedia
Forgot your underwear? As we used to joke in college, turn them inside out. Good for four days, two days per side.
Our daughter forgot to pack underwear for her son (he was about 7 at the time, IIRC) on a trip to Mexico. He was unfazed, but of course it's a great source of family humor.
1. Wash my underwear in the sink
2. Don't wash my hands well enough.
3. Eat lunch of fried chicken and fries
4. Get explosive diarrhea
5. Blame it on Taco Bell
I remember when Eddie Munster got in a fight at school when some kid called him "old droopy drawers".
You never know what can set somebody off. Maybe that's what Logan Paul called Tom Brady.
“I think I lost a button offa me trousers…. You wouldn’t want me trousers to fall down, now would you?”
-Jagger
Letterman had Worldwide Pants.
So what about “knickers” then — are they just for girls!
"Pants on the ground
Pants on the ground
Lookin' like a fool with your pants on the ground"
Tells a different story in a British context.
“ How has the kid forgotten pants if he brought 3 pairs of pants? How long is this vacation? Oh, I get it... pants. When they say "pants," they mean underpants.”
So? The question still stands: how long is this vacation?
They don't have Kohls in Britain? Also, since when has any teenager known how to pack a suitcase? It's one of the many reasons that they still live with their parents. They are teenagers.
The English WW2 RAF ace, Wing Commander Douglas Bader (he of the missing legs) used the callsign "Dogsbody".
I didn't read the article. Did it explain why the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants was formed? Or David Letterman's Worldwide Pants? Will we find out that, just as WC Fields had bank accounts all over the world, Letterman had stashed pants in places he doesn't remember.
Before he got the ring, Gollum's pantses were the treasure he was afraid of losing.
I recall that Jeeves cautioned Bertie Wooster against striped pajamas, among many other sartorial land mines he nimbly prevented Bertie from treading upon. We all need a Jeeves. Then if issues of "pants" over or under packed arose, Jeeves could take the heat. Enjoy the vacation, pants are usually optional if shorts can be worn, daringly or otherwise.
Dogsbody is a favorite comic character in Much Ado About Nothing, played fabulously by Michael Keaton in the 90s. A maliprop spouting ass. I took great delight in playing him in a Shakespearean maskerade with fellow nerds once. Mama didn't pack for me when I went off to science camp in the late 60s. She did buy me 3 new dresses, though.
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