Sarah came over while I worked on the AA site search (I’ll write about this later). We were both loopy and delierious and there was talk of pants, googling, and being a bunch of dorks.
For the next monthly online exhibition, I looked up on google to make sure I spelled menagerie correctly and the wikipedia entry came up. I said “Wow, I didn’t know that was the source of the word” (ie. the zoological background). That must have got her wheels spinning because she asked “Why do they call them a pair of pants when there is only one? We don’t call it a pair of shirt!” Immediately, that episode of Beavis and Butthead came to mind where they make fun of Andy Rooney -”why do we call it take a shit and not leave a shit?” .
After a bit of trying to sound like I know what I am talking about, we looked “pants” up on wikipedia. Wow, there is an article for it. Those crazy Brits and their nicker humor. After a good laugh and learning something new (neither of us new adjectively was a real word and we debated if it was an adverb if it is used to describe how you say the word in question.. uhg… oh and we decided nounification was also a word… spell check is just a liar).
Anyway, Sarah proclaimed “But we still don’t have the answer to my question, so all snarky-like I entered “pair of pants plural wtf” into the Google. The first result nearly made us die (using google cache since the site doesn’t have permalinks). Anyway, a caller calls into a radio show asking the very same question… literally (including the “We don’t call it a pair of shirt!”) part. So the DJ Googles for i, and finds THE VERY SAME QUESTION (yes, also including the “We don’t call it a pair of shirt!”) asked over at Straight Dope. I felt like some sort of weird recursive thing was going on through the interweb. Either way, Sarah and I had a good damn laugh over the absurdity of it all.
I was going to follow this up with a rant about Andy Rooney, but I’ll save that for another day.
