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

[Joel S. Berson]

At 2/20/2009 03:30 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>FWIW, my WAG is "short-shrift." v.

And a "shift" was a kind of skirt (a sense not in much use today, I guess).

(Not suggested entirely seriously.)

Joel


>-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:
> > ---------------------- Information from the
> mail header -----------------------
> > 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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> >
>
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