On New Clothes

[Rex_Tremende]

For Christmas this year, I received from some friends a gift of a page-a-day calendar on "Forgotten English." I guess they figured out that I liked words and etymology.

I felt the entry for Monday, 3 August, somehow put me in mind of our fair gathering place, XMTS, but I can't quite put my finger on how, exactly. So here it is in the off-topic section for your amusement. Maybe.

Nearing Clothes

The garments or linen worn next the skin.

-James Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 1855

Monday 3 August

Feast Day of St. Lydia, a Turkish patroness of fabric makers and dyers.

Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle once chastised his clothes-conscious contemporaries, scoffing: "The all-importance of clothes has sprung up in the intellect of the dandy without effort, like an instinct of genius. He is inspired with cloth-a poet of clothing."

Writing in the 1850s in what was published as his English Notebooks, Nathaniel Hawthorne compared acquaintances with fabrics: "At almost every step of life, we meet with young men with whom we anticipate wonderful things but of whom, after careful inquiry, we never hear another word. Like certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely on their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing day."

But the anonymous Habits of Good Society: A Handbook of Etiquette (1859) reminded social climbers, "While freshness is essential to being well-dressed, a visible newness in one's clothes is as bad as patches and darns. There have been celebrated dressers who would never put on a new coat till it had been worn two or three times by their valets."

Regards,
Rex.

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

Seems perfectly clear to my valet.