"Wife-beater" as article of clothing

[Arnold Zwicky]

i didn't find "wife-beater" in a quick look at the relevant book,
alice harris's [no, not the alice harris who works on georgian] The
White T (1996).  this is a pop, rather than scholarly, book (its
preface is by giorgio armani!), so it doesn't [grrr] have an index; i
might have missed "wife-beater".

mostly i just wanted to echo ron butters.  it seems to me unlikely
that it was specifically brando's portrayal of stanley kowalski that
gave rise to the term.  the white t was already, pre-brando, a symbol
of working class masculinity in the u.s. (at least; i can't speak for
the rest of the world); brando (and james dean, and others) distilled
the image for mass, and high middle, culture.

the sleveless t is part of a stereotype that includes beer-swilling,
wife-haranguing (a la jimmy gleason) or even wife-beating, short-fused
physical aggression, a foul mouth, and a dirty and smelly body.  any
one of these can be used to invoke the stereotype, and so to implicate
any of the others.

it's the same process that gives us "shit-kicker" and "clod-hopper"
(referring to footgear and to the people who wear them).  there
doesn't need to be some specific historical mud-splattered oafish
hick for the expressions to seem appropriate and to spread.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), mildly entertained by the
 idea of "in search of adam shit-kicker" as a (quixotic)
 research project