Sweaters

[Lynne Murphy]

"Aaron E. Drews" wrote:

> Hello All,
>
> I've enclosed a picture of an item of clothing.  What I'm wondering is:
> would anybody call this item of clothing a sweatshirt?  If you don't call it
> a sweatshirt, do you think younger people do, or your colleagues and peers?
>
> The reason I ask is because I'm noticing quite a few people calling this a
> sweatshirt in my data, where I would expect either sweater or jumper.  What
> I want to know is if "sweatshirt" is a legitimate variant in any variety of
> American English, or if my subjects are finding a way of avoiding having to
> say either sweater or jumper, or if my subjects just plain can't tell the
> difference from this picture.
>

I'd never call these "sweatshirts".  Maybe the heathery color makes people
thing "sweatshirt", but the fact that they're cabled and have turtlenecks makes
it obvious to me that they're not sweatshirts.

Lynne


--

M. Lynne Murphy, Assistant Professor in Linguistics
Department of English, Baylor University
PO Box 97404, Waco, TX 76798 USA
Phone:  254-710-6983     Fax:  254-710-3894
http://www.baylor.edu/~M_Lynne_Murphy