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

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:08 AM -0500 2/21/09, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>At 2/20/2009 09:58 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>>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.
>
>Not to mention gender-confused.  Did they mix it up with one another
>when they met?
>
Not all the time, at least in the negative sense, given the
subsequent mixed generations in the "Danelaw" areas.  But maybe
that's why kilts have been popular?  ;-)


LH

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