Mixed Bathing (East Texas); Mixed Swimming (West Texas)

Benjamin Barrett gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM
Sat Sep 1 02:15:19 UTC 2007


Although swimsuit and bathing suit (as well as swimming suit) sound fine
to me, I think I prefer swimsuit. Surely, though, that and maybe a few
other items like swim cap are the only instances.

I've never seen or heard of a bathing beauty movie. Based on your post,
I can imagine it has to do with a woman in a swimsuit, but otherwise I
would have thought it was about women taking a bath. Briefly looking for
Esther Williams, it seems she retired in the 60s and lent her name to
swimwear. I was born in 1966, so perhaps this is common knowledge to
people, say, 50 and over. BB

David A. Daniel wrote:
> Eighteenth/nineteenth century? You're kidding, right? Here we are in 2007
> and I guarantee you that I, along with another billion Anglophones, say
> bathing suit in equal proportion to swim suit. And you never saw a Hollywood
> "bathing beauty" movie? Esther Williams was not a swimming beauty she was a
> bathing beauty. Or am I missing something... ?
> DAD
>
>
>
> "Bathing" was commonly used in NYC in the late 18th CM & early 19th C for
> situations where we would be likely to write "swimming".
> As for "mixing" --
>         Brighton. -- On Saturday last the most novel scene presented itself
> at this celebrated watering place, ever beheld in this country.  On the
> evening and night previous, from two to three hundred carriages of all
> descriptions arrived there, and the next day was seen about noon, between
> four and five hundred persons of different ages and sexes, but in suitable
> dresses, within the distance of one mile, all bathing promiscuously
> together.
>         N-Y Evening Post, August 6, 1811, p. 3, col. 3
>
> GAT
>
>
>
>
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ.
> Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list