Crimean Clothes

As a little follow up to Monday's post on The Charge of the Light Brigade, it's quite astonishing how many clothes are associated with that single military encounter. The basic shape of the disastrous charge was this: Lord Raglan sent an order to Lord Cardigan who got the order rather muddled and set off on the most famous and most foolish charge of the Battle of Balaclava.

Now, Lord Raglan had lost an arm in the Battle of Waterloo and therefore had his coats specially tailored so that the sleeve was sewn on in a line from armpit to neck, rather than out to the corner of the shoulder. This style is known to this day as the Raglan Sleeve.

Lord Cardigan liked wearing button-up jumpers. These are known to this day as cardigans.

Balaclava is a cold sort of place in winter (the charge took place at the end of October) and so the British soldiers kept warm with knitted woollen coverings for their whole heads, which became known as Balaclava caps and then just as balaclavas: a style now favoured by skiers and terrorists.

Incidentally, Lord Raglan lost his arm at Waterloo where he was aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington, after whom the boots.

The rider is Cardigan, the horse is a jumper.

Kingly Corduroy

I have discovered that my trousers are kingly.

That's not to say that they appear regal to the nude eye, but etymologically they should sit upon a throne because they are made of corduroy.

The OED has two alternative etymologies for corduroy: either it is corde du roi, which is French for the king's cord, or it's named after the English surname Corderoy. However, that means it's kingly either way because the family name Corderoy comes from the French coeur de roi meaning heart of a king.

Oddly, the French don't call it corduroy or corde du roi, instead they called them king's cords, meaning that they had borrowed the English French term and translated it to make a French English one.

Corduroy was an English invention and was manufactured in Manchester, which is why the Germans used to call it Manchesterstoff, which sounds a lot less regal.

Tatterdemalion

A tatterdemalion is a chap (or chappess) whose clothes are tattered and torn. It is the same as a tatter-wallop, a ragabash, or a flabergudgion; and, given the threadbare state of modern fashion, it is an eminently useful word.

Tatterdemalion should even be immediately comprehensible to the uninitiated because everybody knows what tatter means, and the demalion bit was never anything more than a linguistic fascinator.

Tatterdemalion is a lovely word with a suggestion of dandelions towards the end (although it is pronounced with all the stress on the may of malion).

More wonderfully still, there are spin off words: tatterdemalionism and tatterdemalionry. This latter word means all tatterdemalions. So, for example:

The tatterdemalionry of Shoreditch cannot endure the glory of my silk scarf.

Tell me that's not a useful phrase.

Dress-down Friday at Inky Fool Mansions

Saint Pants

I think, by default, that my long-schemed week of saints is upon us. Now gaze, dear reader, upon my all-compassionate underwear.

Once upon a time there was a chap who probably didn't exist and who probably wasn't called Pantaleon. Legend has it that he was personal physician to Emperor Maximinianus. When the emperor discovered his doctor was a Christian he got terribly upset and decreed that the doctor should die.

The execution went badly. They tried to burn him alive, but the fire went out. They threw him into molten lead but it turned out to be cold. They lashed a stone to him and chucked him into the sea, but the stone floated. They threw him to wild beasts, which were tamed. They tried to hang him and the rope broke. They tried to chop his head off but the sword bent and he forgave the executioner.

This last kindness was what earned the doctor the name Pantaleon, which means All-Compassionate.

Anyway, in the end they got Pantaleon's head off and he died. By the tenth century he had become the patron saint of Venice. Pantalon therefore became a popular Venetian name and the Venetians themselves were often called the Pantaloni.

Then in the sixteenth century came the Commedia Dell'Arte: short comic plays performed by travelling troupes and always involving the same stock characters like Harlequin and Scaramouch.

Pantalone was the stereotypical Venetian. He was a merchant and a miser and a lustful old man, and he wore one-piece breeches, like Venetians did. These long breeches therefore became known as pantaloons. Pantaloons were shortened to pants and the English (though not the Americans) called their underwear underpants. Underpants were again shortened to pants, which is what I am now wearing.

Pants are all-compassionate. Pants are saints. So think, dear reader, upon my martyred underwear.

I've always liked the lines from Kubla Khan:

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Because I imagine the earth to be wearing thick pants. This etymology also means that Liar, liar, pants on fire is wrong, because they couldn't burn Pantaleon.

History does not record and this mosaic does not reveal whether St Pantaleone wore pants.

P.S. There's also a word pantaloonery, which means either fooling around like Pantalone, or the material used for making pants.