I bought a great book in San Francisco, its name is I just want my pants back, it's written by David J. Rosen and it's very funny and smart at the same time. Anyway, in this book - and it wasn't the first time - I encountered, once again, the word "wife beater"... She was wearing a wife beater, that's the typical sentence... I never really needed to know what exactly she (be it any female character in any of the books I read) was wearing and that's why I never looked the word up in a dictionary. I guess it might have been the fact that I was reading the book on a plane (and the plane's air :)), or whatever, I really wanted to know what piece of clothes can have such a weird name. So I looked it up, finally. My dictionary - Macmillan - doesn't know the word, neither does Longman Online Dictionary. So I tried to google it first to see what it looks like. I was a little surprised, I must say, as I expected it to be something different (for those ignorant as myself, wife beater is sleeveless shirt. Anyway, does this information gratify your curiosity? It didn't work with me, I still wanted to know why on earth would someone call it this.
So I tried Wikipedia. :) And here we go: "The nickname wifebeater originates from its association with aggressive, underclass males, usually living in poor conditions, such as a dilapidated trailer, especially as frequently depicted in television shows and movies." Seriously... Wanna a graphic version?
What can I say... I'm for equality and all that but I strongly believe that men shouldn't wear anything like that. :) Then it should be stopped called a "wife beater" since it's a little weird that a girl is wearing a wife beater. Isn't it? :)
Ok, that was a very serious post. One more thing about how I acquire a new word every day. I just found out that I never knew how to say "Vídeň" (the capital of Austria) in English. I thought I knew but I didn'd. I believed that it's Wien in English, but it's Vienna, could you believe that? I had a BA in English Language. What a joke. :)
Posts
3 comments:
I don't have my contacts in and just woke up so I read that was the "capital of Australia" and when you said Wein, I was thinking you were way off. Then I read Vienna and saw that it was me who had the problem.
And yes, I've always though wife beater was a poor name for a shirt. No item of clothing should be named after a type of assault.
Hey Susan! Exactly, I'm wearing shirts, no stupid wife beaters! And I'm glad to see you here, I'll e-mail you back soon!
But I didn't have it totally wrong. It's Wien in German (and of course, I don't speak German :)) and I guess it's more common here to see the German version and it probably seemed quite English to me. So I believed it, all these years... :)
Post a Comment