OK, I’ll keep this brief…
Ah, please yourselves. Let’s play a little word association game. If I say to you ‘Sam Allardyce’, what’s the first word that pops into your mind?
Hands up everyone who said ‘pants’.
QED. A disgruntled Alan Shearer (is there any other kind of Alan Shearer?) used words like ‘catastrophic’, ‘incredible’, ‘misjudgement’, ‘laughing stock’ and ‘get’. He could have saved himself a lot of trouble and just said ‘pants’. The great thing about ‘pants’ with reference to the short-lived erstwhile England manager is that it could be both something he does and something he is.
Clever thing, language.
Pants is a word that could have been invented to describe England managers but, of course, it wasn’t. It wasn’t invented to describe pants either – not pants as we know them. The word is derived, as we all know, from the French ‘pantalons’, which today means trousers but originally referred to a more skinny garment like tights, as favoured by court jesters, fools and the like. (Hands up everyone who’s thinking ‘Allardyce’). This became ‘pantaloons’ in English, which was abbreviated to ‘pants’ in the late 1800s.
It’s easy to forget that the British ‘pants’ is an abbreviation of ‘underpants’ and, therefore, the bit we’ve kept actually refers not to the undergarment but to the outer garment that we criticise the Americans for calling ‘pants’. But who cares? Our pants are funnier than their pants and that’s all that matters.
‘Pants’ has been in common usage as a derogatory term since at least, well, since I tried to nutmeg Matt N at football training and he looked at me disdainfully and said, ‘That was pants.’ In that moment I knew my vocabulary had been gifted a gem that would light up the remainder of my life. I’ve used the word countless times since and intend to keep doing so to the end. Indeed, I can’t think of a more fitting last word.
‘Pants…’
That first encounter with the adjectival ‘pants’ must have been around the turn of the millennium, yet the dictionaries are still only grudgingly acknowledging the definition of ‘pants’ as anything other than a garment or something a dog or an England manager does. This is because most dictionaries are American and they haven’t been blessed with ‘pants’ as an adjective. Why would they? There’s nothing funny about comparing something to a pair of trousers.
This week’s word was proposed by my sister-in-law, along with several others that I can’t mention.
