(no subject)

[fajrdrako]

I went with maaseru to South Keys today to browse at Chapter's. Yes, I bought a book - The Firefly French/English Visual Dictionary which is unutterably cool. It has words for things I didn't know in English, like muntin. Does everyone here know what a muntin is? Gad. I see them all the time. Didn't even know it had a word. In French it is petit montant. Who knew?

Then there's a picture of something I would have called long johns, which is identified in French as combinaison, a word I know. But in English they call it a 'union suit', a phrase I don't recall ever hearing. Chambers calls long johns "underpants with long legs", which means the upper part is missing, and they don't have 'union suit'. Merriam-Webster says long johns means 'long underwear' (which begs the issue of whether it has sleeves and a top part), while Cambridge online has no listing for long johns, but only long underwear, which then says 'Long underwear (also long johns) is warm, tight-fitting underwear reaching to the feet and hands,' explicitly including the upper part and sleeves. So who the heck uses the phrase "union suit", which is in none of these dictionaries online?

Wikipedia came to my rescue: a union suit is a 19th century version of long johns created in Utica, New York, which isn't far away from here, but culturally different - and, it seems, linguistically different as well.

I do love dictionaries.

After Chapters, maaseru and I went to Cotton Ginny, and discovered they've closed up, with a sign on the door (beside all the SALE signs) saying that they've been closed down for failure to pay the rent.

Damn.

Comments

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

Grew up in VT - recall both union suit and long johns being used to refer to winter underwear. Don't recall being told how to verbally distinguish the one-piece and two-piece varieties. Most from my youth I recall as one-piece.

Don't recall hearing union suit much if at all for a very long time. I noticed, growing up, a lot of advertisement encouraging folks to shop for underwear and other garments with a union label on them. I assumed "union suit" came from something similar, but if it is 19th century, I presume it predated a lot of union activity.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Maybe "union suit" was a sort of New England term? (Sorry, I don't know whether VT is in New England or not.) I think the term may be falling out of use.

I think here we tend to say "long underwear" or "long johns" to cover just about every winter wear underwear eventuality.

[cionaudha.livejournal.com]

Grew up in New Hampshire: agree that union suit and long johns are interchangeable terms for long underwear. So perhaps "union suit" is a New England thing?

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

The fun of having a discussion like this is that you're sometimes able to trace things geographically like that. It would make sense that 'union suit' was the term used where Union suits were sold, which would quite likely be the NE USA.