When I went picking postcards out of inventory for our last thrilling adventure in language and postcards (“Watch Your Phraseology”) I held back a couple when the article seemed to b running long. (See? I do think of the audience once in a while. Beyond wondering why you don’t buy my postcards, I mean.)
The little jolly shown at the top of this column was one of those. This phrase was still used in my boy days, albeit mainly as a joke on assorted sitcoms, And I wondered if anybody still uses it.
If you have not run across it before, the matter of who “wears the pants in this family” is a fine old marital concern. As men, traditionally, were the ones who controlled the money and the property, AND traditionally wore pants, the pants were a symbol of them being the boss at home. Also traditionally, there would be no such phrase if this was always obvious to both sides in a marriage.
And, um, no, it is not considered a current phrase by the youngsters who populate the interwebs, to judge by the number of “what does this phrase mean?” articles out there. You saw at once the two problems, of course. No, not the husband and wife: the fact that 1) nowadays even women who do NOT rule the roost wear pants, and 2) men are not automatically considered the most fit to make family decisions nowadays. (Plenty of folktales tell us this was true LONG before “nowadays”, but let’s consider the infants who rule the ether for now.)
In fact, the number of writers who immediately charge off down an entirely unnecessary side road shows that a lot of the commentators don’t even feel the phrase is all that interesting. THEY would rather study the history of the word “pants”, at least slightly prompted by the fact that the phrase started in the seventeenth century as “who wears the breeches in this family”, became “who wears the trousers in this family”, and only later, after a secondary side journey into the history of the word “pantaloons”, “who wears the PANTS in this family.”
Other people are confused by the fact that for maybe a century and a half now, most women DID wear pants: that is, underpants. So THOSE young writers shift onto a side track on the history of “panties”, a word which many are doing their best to eradicate in favor of just “pants”.
And THAT takes us into the delightful sideroad of jokes about husbands and wives and their underwear, which comes back eventually to the huge man who tosses HIS undershorts to his wife “to remind you who wears the pants in this family. Those won’t fit you”, whereupon she throws her tiny thong, daring him to put THAT on. When told that he can’t even get into her pants, she replies, “Yeah and that’s the way it’s gonna be until you change your attitude about who wears pants in this family.”
We are, of course, ourselves now straying from the path. To summarize, the phrase “wear the breeches in this family” appeared first in the writings of a putative ancestor of mine in 1612, but even HE was using it in a way that showed it was an old phrase and generally not true of the poor husband. It lasted well through the mid-twentieth century despite quibbles about underpants. (One great humorist in the 1940s had one of her women sigh that “the world belongs to them as wears their pants on the outside”.) But now, under the impact of society and fashion, it seems to have been relegated to the Dictionary of Bygones and Exiles.
And I will not ever have room in this blog about ALL the jokes about husbands and wives discussing underwear. Pity, that.
Blogsy Babbles 