shirting

[Joel S. Berson]

"Shirting" as "material for shirts" goes back to 1604; "shirt" as
verb to 1601.  It's hard for me to tell from the quotations whether
the OED has "shirting" in the present verbal sense, which seems to be
"making a shirt for", as distinguished from the verbal sense "to
clothe with a shirt" and the noun senses of material or garment.

Joel

At 7/7/2009 10:40 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>At 6:22 AM -0400 7/7/09, Bill Palmer wrote:
>>I'm not a regular O'Reilly watcher, so maybe this has been going on
>>a long time...among the closing credits of this morning's broadcast
>>(re-broadcast, maybe) was "Custom Shirtings by....")  Apparently "To
>>shirt" is a transitive verb. Who knew?
>Why transitive?  Why verb, for that matter?  I think I've come across
>this -ing elsewhere, forming fancy nouns from plain ones.  I wouldn't
>assume from this that any of the staffers had shirted the host or
>guests.  Or perhaps this is a spinoff of the Franglais tradition,
>where "un parking" is a parking lot (or the act of parking) but
>there's no verb "parker" 'to park', or at least there didn't use(d)
>to be--"parquer" might exist now alongside the usual "stationner".  I
>seem to recall other such innovative -ing nominals in Franglais but I
>can't recall any at the moment.
>
>LH, noting that "shirted" earns one of my Eudora underlines while
>"shirting" does not...
>
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org