"dungarees"

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:59 PM -0500 2/2/09, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>At 2/2/2009 09:46 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:
>>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>>
>>Good heavens! AFAIR I've always known the word "dungarees", possibly before
>>I knew them as jeans. (Grew up in the 50s in the NYC suburbs.)
>
>The city boys too knew dungarees, even though they might not have
>known suburban dung.  Or perhaps where I grew up, the Bronx, would
>have been considered suburban then?
>
I was in Manhattan in those years, which I'm pretty sure wouldn't be
suburban by any standards, although we did have our share of dung,
and lots of dungarees.  But does the Hindi source (= 'a kind of
coarse inferior calico') relate to dung at all?  Anyone know Hindi?
I've always thought it was nice that the various words for our
all-American garment derive from Hindi and two eponyms, one from a
city in Italy.

LH

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