Fashionspeaek, et.al.

Last week was fashion week, if anyone was paying any attention to such a thing. We used to have a local fashion writer on our little local daily paper and she would go to New York and hobnob with designers and media fashion stars and write a full report for the Sunday paper with accounts of luncheons at Park Avenue designers' luxurious apartments and all. This always struck me as somewhat over the top for our small town . I mean, the publisher's wife made her own goddam clothes, for cryin' out loud. This fashion editor wrote well enough to win awards for her breathless accounts of what she saw on the runways. She was also the editor of what used to be called the Society page, and was my favorite source for WCLV's "This Week in the Media," for which prizes were awarded to those sending in goofs from the media. I don't know how many prizes I won thanks to her: CDs, jewelry, tickets, etc. I even got something published in the New Yorker from one of her columns, plus a check for $25.00. But I digress.

My subject today is the irritating word choices that the fashion folks use. The first is their calling pants "pant," as in, "Here we have this divine pant from Gucci, in hot pink silk boucle,"

A pant is what one does in the heat of passion, or what your pooch does when the weather is hot. If you are wearing a pant, you may well be run in for indecent exposure. Maybe a one legged pair of pants could be called a pant, but then again, you may have the indecent exposure thing happening. The word "pants" is plural. Use it, dammit.

The other word usage which irritates the hell out of me is "You look well in that dress," or "That dress looks well on you." This is quite common, and is of those "between you and I" school of excruciating attempts at correctness. Clothing is moot capable of looking, therefore it cannot look well or even spectacularly. It is not capable of being ill, ergo, cannot look well. If one has been sick, then one can look well (healthier) even in rags, if need be, once one has recovered. It is okay to use the word "good." If something looks good on a person, clothing, a necklace, a tick, for goodness say tell them they look good, o r that the clothes they have on look good on them, or if they have torn them off and are panting, tell them that they had looked good, especially with their pants on.

God! Idiots!! - Napoleon Dynamite.