One leg at a time

Sep 08, 2008 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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I was caught with my pants down; fortunately, not literally.  When I was an energetic little boy, and my breath came in short pants, I believed then that the difference between men and women was that men wore pants and women wore dresses.  Then women, following the fashions of the US and Europe, started wearing pants, too.
In Trinidad, we used the word “trousers” then to mean “pants,” but used the two words interchangeably.  Pierre Trudeau, for instance, visited the Prime Minister’s Office in Trinidad wearing “hot pants,” which were the rage in those days.  For women, there were short-of-a-length pants, called “pedal pushers,” and for men and boys there was one with a buckle over the buns, called a “sister-boy”.  This led to confusion and sometimes fights when you said to one of the other young men, “I like your sister-boy!”
Then bloomers came in – not for boys, but for girls. These were named after Amelia Bloomer, who popularised them.  Up to then, most girls’ underwear was called bloomers as well as panties, but the bloomer, as an outer-garment, was a fad for a while.
In America, men wore the “pants” in the family, meaning “trousers”, which the British men wore.  American women wore “pants” and other derivatives (e.g. panties).  “Panty-hose” were not prostitutes clad in underwear only.  British women wore “knickers”. This term came from loose, knee-length breeches worn by the “Knickerbocker” family of Washington Irving’s droll work, “History of New York”.
George Cruickshank, who illustrated most of the works of Charles Dickens, was responsible for the artwork.  The British use of the word “knickers” for female underwear was to describe the loose-fitting, baggy underwear favoured by women in the 1860s, and the term persisted even though the styles changed.  Any comparison between the New York Knicks and loose women’s underwear is merely thong in cheek.
The difference between British and American usage can be confusing.  An American Jack was going to be married to an American Jill.  His American father advised him soberly: “Jack, let me tell you something. On my wedding night in our honeymoon suite, I took off my pants and handed them to your mother, and said, ‘Here, try these on.’   So, she did and said, ‘these are too big, I can’t wear them.’
I replied, ‘Exactly! I wear the pants in this family, and always will.’ Ever since that night, we have never had any problems.”   Jack thought that might be a good thing to try. On his honeymoon, he took off his pants and said to Jill: “Here, try these on.”  She did and said, “These are too big.  They don’t fit me.”  Jack replied with a tight smile, “Exactly. I wear the pants in this family, and I always will, and I don’t want you to ever forget that.”
Then Jill removed her pants, handed them to Jack and said, “Here, you try on mine.”  He tried and gave up, “I can’t get into your pants.”  And she replied cockily, “Exactly. And if you don’t change your attitude, you never will.”
By now, dear reader, you must be panting (and not champing) at the bit to know exactly where I am going with this.  Am I founding a new religion, some variation of Pantheism perhaps, or am I trying to fob you off when you’re already out of pocket by having to buy a newspaper?
The fact is that Steve Jetley, of Shrewsbury, England, changed his password at Lloyd’s Bank to “Lloyds is pants”.  To West Indians this would be no big deal.  But “pants” in this context (according to the Dictionary of Slang) means “Nonsense, rubbish, bad.”  It also means “underwear,” and is a variation on “knickers”.  An example given is a comment from a moviegoer: “The first half was pants, but I stayed until the end and it was actually a great film.”
The BBC’s “e-encyclopedia” states, “pile of pants, noun, slang, official term of rejection. Relatively new, non-swearing slang term, meaning a load of rubbish, or, indeed, knickers. Pants in this sense (NB: not trousers, as in the US; in the UK, pants means underwear) only became slang in the 1990s (according to slang lexicographer Jonathon Green). It became official term of rejection even more recently (see below).
Popular with students and DJs.”  This was then followed by, “USAGE: Letter rejecting asylum seeker’s case, from a Home Office official, December 2000: “With regard to your claim to be a national of Afghanistan, the Secretary of State thinks that this is a pile of pants.”
Lloyd’s did not like Mr. Jetley’s password and substituted it with “no it’s not”.   Jetley told the BBC, “But what really incensed me was when I was told I could not change it back to ‘Lloyds is pants’ because they said it was not appropriate. I asked if it was ‘pants’ they didn’t like, and would ‘Lloyds is rubbish’ do? But they didn’t think so.”
He suggested, “Barclays is better” but that also bounced. He came up with “censorship” and was then told that the passwords had to be one word of no more than six letters.  Lloyd’s eventually apologized, fired the person who had changed Jetley’s password but remarked that if Jetley was not satisfied with Lloyd’s he should have found a different bank.
What crowned it all was a story headlined, “Malaysian man gets nut stuck around penis” about a welder who had to have a nut removed from around his penis after an attempt to lengthen it before his engagement went embarrassingly wrong.
This joke came to mind: A man saw a sign in a clothing store which said “We sell everything!” He went in and asked the clerk for some glass pants.  The woman replied, “Sorry, sir, we don’t sell those.”  The man argued that the sign stated the store sold everything and the woman insisted that glass pants did not even exist.  The man went to his home and came back to the store wearing a pair of glass pants.
The man said triumphantly, “See, I told you that they existed!”  The woman said, “At first I thought you were crazy, but now I see you’re nuts!”
*Tony Deyal was last seen wondering if, to avoid the embarrassment, the Malaysian man fled the hospital in which case the headline would read: “Welder with nut on rod bolts”.

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