"Wife-beater" as article of clothing

[Gregory {Greg} Downing]

At 02:03 PM 5/12/2000 EDT, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>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?
>

Right. My guess -- perhaps no better, of course -- was that the putatively
old-fashioned and down-scale type of male who'd wear this item (especially
as outerwear) is the "kind of person" that others would assume to be a
likely wife-beater. Compare, perhaps, the phrase "n-gger-hatin' hat" for a
ten-gallon hat, which I'd assume has a similar origin, i.e., from the idea
the kind of person who wears one is the kind of person who probably engages
in the supposedly correlative activity.

If so, we'd be dealing with broadly shared generalizations about classes --
their wearables, their activities, and their beliefs are seen as a package.


Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu