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

[Joel S. Berson]

At 2/20/2009 09:58 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>At 9:18 PM -0500 2/20/09, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>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
>
>And way back when, shirt = skirt, only for the Anglo-Saxons and Danes
>respectively; it's only natural that *they* should get conflated.

Not to mention gender-confused.  Did they mix it up with one another
when they met?

Joel

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