"short-skirt", v. = 'to shortchange, give short shrift to'

[Laurence Horn]

Mike Francesa on "Mike'd Up on the FAN", his now solo sports radio
talk show, 5 minutes ago:

"I know we have short-skirted the Mets"

--meaning not that the station has garbed the team in miniskirts to
liven up their Florida spring training workouts, but that they've
been neglecting coverage of the Mets given all the brouhaha about the
Yankees in the wake of the new A-Rod revelations.

Here's one earlier google hit, this from a comment by "Matt" on a
Bush press conference in 2004:

I didn't think he was joking about having the questions in advance.
He seemed to be falling apart enough that he would've actually wanted
them to prepare some long-winded answer that short-skirted the actual
question like always
http://www.1115.org/2004/04/14/objection-your-honor-unresponsive-permission-to-treat-the-witness-as-hostile/

But here's a much fuller reflection on www.wordwizard.com by Ken
Greenwald on the construction, along with the (psychologically)
related verbs "to short-shirt" and "to short-sheet" [that last one I
knew, with the meaning indicated below, from summer camp days].
Based the comments copied below, Francesa's "short-skirt" wasn't just
a slip, as it were, but a real live eggcorn:

=====================
http://www.wordwizard.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=20072&start=0
I was driving home listening to NPR (National Public Radio) this
evening when I heard the following:
<2007 "The Democratic Congress is determined not to appear any less
supportive of the men and women of America's armed forces than the
preceding Congresses. They're not going to look like they're
short-shirting the troops when they're deployed in the field."-NPR's
Marketplace, 2 October>

I'm not familiar with the verb SHORT-SHIRT, but assumed that it meant
something like shortchanging, or giving less than one's due, or
giving 'short shrift.' A search of all my usual sources, however,
produced nada for this verb form. On the other hand, I figured that I
might have misheard it and that they had actually said
SHORT-SHEETING, which is a trick we used to play on guys in college
dorm rooms, my army barracks, and possibly at Boy Scout camp, in
which we folded the sheet on their bunk in half so that when the
unsuspecting slipped into bed their feet would abruptly come in
contact with the abbreviated bedding. But the above transcript that I
found on the NPR website, confirmed that I had heard the expression
correctly.

I'm not sure what to make of this. The 1996 and 2005 quotes below
seem to imply a punning on a supposedly known expression. And the
1998 quote struck me as being a possible misspelling of, or confusion
with the expression 'short-skirting' (one word? two words?
hyphenated?), which I have used all my life to mean 'go around' or
'avoid,' as in "He short-skirted the issue," until I went to look it
up and found I couldn't find that one either - where did I get that
from . . . Brooklyn? Or perhaps my father or mother made it up and I
had assumed it was in general use. Anyone else ever hear of it?

On the other hand, maybe SHORT-SHIRTING derives from just being a
mishearing of SHORT-SHEETING, which actually would fit quite well
into the NPR quote since it is military-related and has about the
right meaning:

SHORT-SHEET verb: To play a nasty trick trick; maltreat: ". . .
headed for big things until the Reagan crowd short-sheeted you."-W.
T. Tyler; "England's favorite recreational activity, short-sheeting
the royals."-Milwaukee Journal. [from a student and barracks
practical joke in which a bedsheet is folded in half and made to
appear as an upper and lower sheet, so when the victim gets into bed
the stretching legs and toes are painfully arrested] (Chapman's
Dictionary of American Slang)
=================
[see also replies to Greenwald's post at the link]

LH

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