Thank you, Chris. There is only one place in Canterbury where the Staggers can be obtained (right wing yokels that we are) and I couldn't spare more than five minutes, being parked upon two yellow lines. The winning Wendyverse appears in her works somewhere. I agree that the word has to go REspectaBILity, but such is the iron will of the metre that it does, it does. It's true about Kennedy's socks.
I have to insist on NIKolas SARkozy, but I reckon, the name being French, that is a better approximation than Brit sar-KOzy, and I've got my wife's afreement o that - A level French to my O level.
Allen, I don't know why pants means what it does. It may follow naturally from the use of 'Knickers!' as an expletive meaning 'Bother!', which I actually use myself. The pants are obviously underpants rather than trousers. We don't call trousers pants, not nohow. Come on, Ann, you will know this! A learned woman, she!
What foulmouthed Sarko actually said is recounted by Rod Liddle in this week's Speccie. What he may have said about Barak to someone else we can only guess at.
Added later. There is (says a slang dictionary) some schoolboy slang (boarding schoolboy slang perhaps, since your unposh correspondent does not know it) 'a pile of pants' meaning 'smelly and useless'. Only boys at boarding school would collect a pile of pants. We dayschool chaps would have given them to our mothers to wash long before they became a pile. There is also an expression 'to pants someone' meaning to strip them to their underpants, thus humiliating them. A bit of pantsing occurs in John Betjeman's versde autobiography 'Summoned by Bells' though Betj doesn't use the word.
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