"fur bikini"

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:42 PM -0500 1/9/07, Charles Doyle wrote:
>I wasn't sure whether Fred meant by "two areas" top-and-bottom or
>front-and-back.  "Bikini panties" certainly don't cover anything at
>the top, and they may or may not offer any significant amount of
>dorsal coverage.
>
>"Furkini"?  "Merkini"?
>
>--Charlie

I like "merkini", although it's a bit opaque.

The difference for me between "bikini panties" and "fur bikini" is
that the former (given the semantics of compounding) are a kind of
panties, viz. the kind that looks like what you have with a bikini,
while the latter is a kind of bikini, which comes in two parts, top
and bottom.  A woman whose bikini top is washed away in the ocean is
now wearing a bikini top, not a bikini, and after all we do have the
evidence from the reanalysis and coinage of "monokini", even though
there's no "bi-" prefix historically in "bikini".

LH

>_________________________________________________
>
>---- Original message ----
>>Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2007 11:31:48 -0500
>>From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>>Subject: Re: "fur bikini"
>>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>>
>>At 9:40 AM -0500 1/9/07, Fred Shapiro wrote:
>>>On Tue, 9 Jan 2007, Charles Doyle wrote:
>>>
>>>>Insomniac TV was showing Hugh Hefner's 80th (!) birthday. His
>>>>current girlfriend--buxom (of course), blonde (naturally?), and
>>>>mid-twentyish--had organized a party for Hef. She had invited
>>>>several elderly Playmates from the 1970s, who (she explained
>>>>matter-of-factly) had posed in the magazine in the old-fashioned
>>>>style--in "fur bikinis." That is, they did not shave (or
>>>>otherwise depilate) their pubic area.
>
>>>
>>>This seems like an odd term, in that the essence of a bikini is
>>>that it covers (at least minimally) two areas of a woman's body,
>>>whereas the fur here presumably covers only one area.
>>>
>>>Fred
>
>>>
>>>
>>Indeed; seems more like a retronymic fur monokini.
>>
>>LH
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org