Alpine trek pant? Isn't that what you do when you've got to the top of Mont Blanc & are a bit out of breath? They're trousers, not a bl**dy pant. [/pedant mode]
Pants: One would not expect a word for a modern article of clothing to come ultimately from the name of a 4th-century Roman Catholic saint, but that is the case with the word pants. It can be traced back to Pantaleon, the patron saint of Venice. He became so closely associated with the inhabitants of that city that the Venetians were popularly known as Pantaloni. Consequently, among the commedia dell'arte's stock characters the representative Venetian (a stereotypically wealthy but miserly merchant) was called Pantalone, or Pantalon in French. In the mid-17th century the French came to identify him with one particular style of trousers, a style which became known as pantaloons in English. Pantaloons was later applied to another style that came into fashion in the late 18th century, tight-fitting garments that had begun to replace knee breeches. After that pantaloons was used to refer to trousers in general. The abbreviation of pantaloons to pants met with some resistance at first; it was considered vulgar and, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, "a word not made for gentlemen, but 'gents.'" First found in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe in 1840, pants has replaced the "gentleman's word" in English and has lost all obvious connection to Saint Pantaleon.
trousers 1612, earlier trouzes (1581), extended from trouse (1578), with plural ending typical of things in pairs, from Gaelic or Middle Irish triubhas "close-fitting shorts," of uncertain origin. The unexplained intrusive second -r- is perhaps by influence of drawers.
But I think that pants, the abbreviation of pantaloon, is an American evolution of the word. Interesting, isn't it, how we view words which were exported to the 'colonies' when perfectly acceptable English, then when they return, sometimes in a mutated form, we sometimes despise them as 'un-English'. Strictly speaking, then, they should be Alpine Trek Pantaloons.
The OM search is utter pants vs. The OM search is utter trousers.
Hmm. Quite a difference. M&S talk about trousers. Odd that people use the american word for outdoor gear. Doesn't seem to happen with jello or jelly.
In italian the phrase for 'If I were in your shoes' is 'nei toi pantaloni', literally 'in your trousers'. I wonder of any OM'ers would like to get into any other's pants -- err I mean trousers?
oh don't say that! i had presumed - hoped even - that because of the flaps they have reverted to using easy to open with one hand zips rather than the stiff two-handed struggle with not waterproof anyway zips the current garments are afflicted with. time will tell. looks like a great jacket if the zips work easily.
But they are not described as 'pants', but as a 'pant', singular. Pant is what a dog does (or me at sight of Kylie's bum [/digression]). Anyway, they're still trousers.
