"Wife-beater" as article of clothing

[Bob Haas]

You're right, Ron.  Besides, I've been thinking about it and Stanley never
wears an athletic tee; he wears regular, white tees.  They just get torn up
a lot.

I think I was conflating STREETCAR and RAGING BULL--sort of A RAGING
STREETCAR NAMED BULLISH DESIRE--and the brutish behavior of the respective
protagonists.  (Is Stanley the protagonist?  A topic for another list.)

BUT despite my obvious errors of fact--the mark of a true academic, one who
continues to argue all the more vigorously when he is admittedly
wrong--can't a literary source be the inspiration for a term, without the
term itself being used in the source?  Never mind, I suppose then the
story/movie/novel would no longer be the origin, but the inspiration for the
origin.

I am quieted.

bob

> From: RonButters at AOL.COM
> Reply-To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 14:03:18 EDT
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: "Wife-beater" as article of clothing
>
> In a message dated 5/12/2000 12:37:05 PM, highbob at MINDSPRING.COM writes:
>
> << Whoa!  I just looked at the archives and no wonder the STREETCAR link felt
> so good.  I made it.  Sorry, Amanda, but I think that it's a pretty good
> idea for the source of "wife-beater" t-shirts.  >>
>
> Unless one of the characters in STREETCAR (or Williams in his copious statge
> directions) actually uses the term (if so, I certainly don't remember it), I
> can't imagine why there should be any etymological connection between this
> kind of shirt and its current vogue name. So what if in the 1950s movie
> Brando as Stanley wore one and beat his wife?