Mixed Bathing (East Texas); Mixed Swimming (West Texas)

[Charles Doyle]

I am a good deal more likely to say "bathing suit" than "swimming suit" or "swimsuit." Is there a regional aspect to the probability here? (In my childhood, however, the ponds used for informal dips were "swimming holes," not *"bathing holes"--just as the official concreted facilities were never *"bathing pools").

--Charlie
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---- Original message ----
>Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 19:15:19 -0700
>From: Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM>
>
>Although swimsuit and bathing suit (as well as swimming suit) sound fine
>to me, I think I prefer swimsuit. Surely, though, that and maybe a few
>other items like swim cap are the only instances.
>
>I've never seen or heard of a bathing beauty movie. Based on your post,
>I can imagine it has to do with a woman in a swimsuit, but otherwise I
>would have thought it was about women taking a bath. Briefly looking for
>Esther Williams, it seems she retired in the 60s and lent her name to
>swimwear. I was born in 1966, so perhaps this is common knowledge to
>people, say, 50 and over. BB
>
>David A. Daniel wrote:
>> Eighteenth/nineteenth century? You're kidding, right? Here we are in 2007
>> and I guarantee you that I, along with another billion Anglophones, say
>> bathing suit in equal proportion to swim suit. And you never saw a Hollywood
>> "bathing beauty" movie? Esther Williams was not a swimming beauty she was a
>> bathing beauty. Or am I missing something... ?
>> DAD
>>
>>
>>
>> "Bathing" was commonly used in NYC in the late 18th CM & early 19th C for
>> situations where we would be likely to write "swimming".
>> As for "mixing" --
>>         Brighton. -- On Saturday last the most novel scene presented itself
>> at this celebrated watering place, ever beheld in this country.  On the
>> evening and night previous, from two to three hundred carriages of all
>> descriptions arrived there, and the next day was seen about noon, between
>> four and five hundred persons of different ages and sexes, but in suitable
>> dresses, within the distance of one mile, all bathing promiscuously
>> together.
>>         N-Y Evening Post, August 6, 1811, p. 3, col. 3
>>
>> GAT
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> George A. Thompson
>> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ.
>> Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>>
>>
>
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