"what have you done to me! I think it might have been sneaky, or at least tricky!"

i'm really offended that you would call me sneaky. now tricky, that's fine. call me tricky all day long. but sneaky. man, that cuts...

as for the WB, this term has now evolved (or devolved) into common usage. and the funny thing is, as far as i know i started it. i mean, somebody somewhere came up with words like fart, and poop, and other terms much more offensive, and they've anonymously receded into history. i independently started WB about 15 or 20 years ago and maybe it was also spontaneously being used in other parts of the country, or even overseas. i really have no way of knowing.

but since i'm being inducted into the hall of fame for starting such things as the tri wetsuit and the tri bike, i feel my bona fides have been established as a starter of things, and so i'm going to claim the discovery of WB, if not the credit for its invention (which belongs to hanes or fruit of the loom or whatever).

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

<i independently started WB about 15 or 20 years ago and maybe it was also spontaneously being used in other parts of the country, or even overseas. i really have no way of knowing.>

Hmm. I recall my spouse (to be) using the expression in the mid-'70s (SoCal), so I did a little looking around. Some attribute it to Ike Turner (1968), others to "A Street Car Named Desire," still others to Ralph Cramden and Ed Norton ("Honeymooners"). Nothing I found is definitive, but WB is apparently poised to enter (at least the online) Oxford English Dictionary, which should settle it. See, for example:

http://web.sunybroome.edu/...ENG111WifeBeater.htm

David

Dude stop worrying about what your woman says. If she has a problem with you gear just show her the pimp hand. She'll come around.

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customerjon @gmail.com is where information happens.

I think that this started, at least in my experience, around the time that the TV show Cops started beaming the shallow end of the gene pool into our homes every week. Sure enough, almost every time the cops knocked on someone's door, if a guy answered, he was wearing a wife-beater shirt. If he was driving drunk on the other hand, then he wore no shirt at all. I first heard the term in the early nineties, but it became mainstream because of Eminem and the like, who were always trotting around in them. For Eminem, in fact, who proudly raps about beating and killing his wife(whether actual or fronting) the wife-beater is part of his signature look, whereas your more conservative "gangsta" type rappers will simply wear prison uniforms or copious bling bling.

Technically, they are called athletic or A-shirts, as opposed to T-shirts, and I wear them because they offer little restriction in the neck and arms compared to t-shirts. By the way, my grandfather always wore A-shirts, which were much more commonly worn in his generation than they are now.

One of the most pathetic examples of the PC nazis at work that I have seen lately was a few months ago when a reviewer for The Boston Globe wrote of a concert that the audience was comprised of "guys in wife-beater t-shirts and low-hanging jeans, with their girlfriends in mid-shirts and mini-skirts." The Boston Globe got bombarded by people who were offended by the use of the term "wife-beater", and actually issued an apology, despite the fact that, as you say, this term has been in common usage for years. Hell, my 14 year-old nephew started calling them that 4 years ago.

I am also a fan of coining terms. One of the more unlikely ones, which I heard on television a few weeks ago, and which I can't believe stuck is "shoot him in the face". I can provide the historical background for it as proof.

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"...The Boston Globe..."

Isn't this the same rag that refers to Chappaquiddick as "Ted Kennedy's heroic rescue attempt?"

Don't get me started. It's pretty scary when you start referring to The Boston Globe as "the conservative paper" compared to the putrid sludge that the other paper is troweling out. These days, I mostly just read the Wall Street Journal. They are fairly balanced, and they tell you when they're giving you their opinion, as opposed to profferring it as fact.

Yup, I'm surrounded by people who feel comfortable equating George W. to Hitler, but think Saddam is/was a helpless pawn in all of this, people who think that The UN was justified in not involving themselves in Rwanda, people who think that "peace at any cost" is just good politics...

Must....stop....before...rant....begins........

Oh, and if Teddy wasn't suffering from alcohol poisoning, he would have saved her too.

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"...I'm surrounded by people who feel comfortable equating George W. to Hitler..."

I attended a one-month course at the KSG at the Kremlin on the Charles so I know how you feel.