"short-skirt", v. = 'to shortchange, give short shrift to'

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:18 PM -0500 2/20/09, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>At 2/20/2009 03:30 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>>
>>FWIW, my WAG is "short-shrift." v.
>
>And a "shift" was a kind of skirt (a sense not in much use today, I guess).
>
>(Not suggested entirely seriously.)
>
>Joel

And way back when, shirt = skirt, only for the Anglo-Saxons and Danes
respectively; it's only natural that *they* should get conflated.

LH

>
>
>>-Wilson
>>---
>>All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
>>come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>>-----
>>-Mark Twain
>>
>>
>>
>>On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 1:27 PM, Laurence Horn
>><laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>>  ---------------------- Information from the
>>mail header -----------------------
>>>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>>  Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>>>  Subject:      "short-skirt", v. = 'to shortchange, give short shrift to'
>>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>>  Mike Francesa on "Mike'd Up on the FAN", his now solo sports radio
>>>  talk show, 5 minutes ago:
>>>
>>>  "I know we have short-skirted the Mets"
>>>
>>>  --meaning not that the station has garbed the team in miniskirts to
>>>  liven up their Florida spring training workouts, but that they've
>>>  been neglecting coverage of the Mets given all the brouhaha about the
>>>  Yankees in the wake of the new A-Rod revelations.
>>>
>>>  Here's one earlier google hit, this from a comment by "Matt" on a
>>>  Bush press conference in 2004:
>>>
>>>  I didn't think he was joking about having the questions in advance.
>>>  He seemed to be falling apart enough that he would've actually wanted
>>>  them to prepare some long-winded answer that short-skirted the actual
>>>  question like always
>>>
>>http://www.1115.org/2004/04/14/objection-your-honor-unresponsive-permission-to-treat-the-witness-as-hostile/
>>>
>>>  But here's a much fuller reflection on www.wordwizard.com by Ken
>>>  Greenwald on the construction, along with the (psychologically)
>>>  related verbs "to short-shirt" and "to short-sheet" [that last one I
>>>  knew, with the meaning indicated below, from summer camp days].
>>>  Based the comments copied below, Francesa's "short-skirt" wasn't just
>>>  a slip, as it were, but a real live eggcorn:
>>>
>>>  =====================
>>>  http://www.wordwizard.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=20072&start=0
>>>  I was driving home listening to NPR (National Public Radio) this
>>>  evening when I heard the following:
>>>  <2007 "The Democratic Congress is determined not to appear any less
>>>  supportive of the men and women of America's armed forces than the
>>>  preceding Congresses. They're not going to look like they're
>>>  short-shirting the troops when they're deployed in the field."-NPR's
>>>  Marketplace, 2 October>
>>>
>>>  I'm not familiar with the verb SHORT-SHIRT, but assumed that it meant
>>>  something like shortchanging, or giving less than one's due, or
>>>  giving 'short shrift.' A search of all my usual sources, however,
>>>  produced nada for this verb form. On the other hand, I figured that I
>>>  might have misheard it and that they had actually said
>>>  SHORT-SHEETING, which is a trick we used to play on guys in college
>>>  dorm rooms, my army barracks, and possibly at Boy Scout camp, in
>>>  which we folded the sheet on their bunk in half so that when the
>>>  unsuspecting slipped into bed their feet would abruptly come in
>>>  contact with the abbreviated bedding. But the above transcript that I
>>>  found on the NPR website, confirmed that I had heard the expression
>>>  correctly.
>>>
>>>  I'm not sure what to make of this. The 1996 and 2005 quotes below
>>>  seem to imply a punning on a supposedly known expression. And the
>>>  1998 quote struck me as being a possible misspelling of, or confusion
>>>  with the expression 'short-skirting' (one word? two words?
>>>  hyphenated?), which I have used all my life to mean 'go around' or
>>>  'avoid,' as in "He short-skirted the issue," until I went to look it
>>  > up and found I couldn't find that one either - where did I get that
>>>  from . . . Brooklyn? Or perhaps my father or mother made it up and I
>>>  had assumed it was in general use. Anyone else ever hear of it?
>>>
>>>  On the other hand, maybe SHORT-SHIRTING derives from just being a
>>>  mishearing of SHORT-SHEETING, which actually would fit quite well
>>>  into the NPR quote since it is military-related and has about the
>>>  right meaning:
>>>
>>>  SHORT-SHEET verb: To play a nasty trick trick; maltreat: ". . .
>>>  headed for big things until the Reagan crowd short-sheeted you."-W.
>>>  T. Tyler; "England's favorite recreational activity, short-sheeting
>>>  the royals."-Milwaukee Journal. [from a student and barracks
>>>  practical joke in which a bedsheet is folded in half and made to
>>>  appear as an upper and lower sheet, so when the victim gets into bed
>>>  the stretching legs and toes are painfully arrested] (Chapman's
>>>  Dictionary of American Slang)
>>>  =================
>>>  [see also replies to Greenwald's post at the link]
>>>
>>>  LH
>>>
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>>>
>>
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>
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