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

[Wilson Gray]

FWIW, my WAG is "short-shrift." v.

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain



On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 1:27 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      "short-skirt", v. = 'to shortchange, give short shrift to'
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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