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WTF grant! - that first link opened up a super annoying series of popups. Evil.
On knickers, short for knickerbockers....
...mens' or boys' baggy knee trousers, of a type particularly popular in the early 20th century. Golfers' plus twos and plus fours, now also generally a thing of the past, are trousers of this type. Before World War II, skiiers often wore knickerbockers too.
The term came from the fictional author of Washington Irving's History of New York, (published 1809), Diedrich Knickerbocker, an old-fashioned Dutch New Yorker in Irving's satire of chatty and officious local history. In fact, Washington Irving had a real friend named Herman Knickerbocker, whose name he borrowed. [...] After Irving's History, by 1831, "Knickerbocker" had become a local bye-word for quaint Dutch-descended New Yorkers, with their old-fashioned ways and their long-stemmed pipes and knee-breeches long after the fashion had turned to trousers. Thus the "New York Knickerbockers" were an amateur social and athletic club organized on Manhattan's (Lower) East Side in 1842, largely to play "base ball" according to written rules; on June 19, 1846 the New York Knickerbockers played the first game of "base ball" organized under those rules, in Hoboken, New Jersey, and were trounced 23 - 1.
More than you ever wanted to know. |
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