Short Pants Touch My Feet, Okay?

Girlfriend's Day
Lughnasadh (Wiccan)
National Night Out
Respect for Parents Day
Rounds Resounding Day
Anniversary - MTV
Anniversary - World Wide Web (Amelia Sez: Happy birthday, internet!)
Birthday - Jerry Garcia (musician)
Birthday - Francis Scott Key (writer US National Anthem)  (Amelia sez: Thanks a lot, Frank.)
Birthday - Herman Melville (writer) (Amelia sez: Have you ever read about this guy?  His life was like the most swashbuckling sailor story ever written.  They should totally base movies on Herman Melville's life, not just his epic tales.)
Admission Day (Colorado)
Emancipation Day (Trinidad, Tobago)
Abolition of Slavery Day (Jamaica)
Independence Day (Benin)

 

I learned about this first back when my friend and her mother took me shopping for suitable bridesmaid stuff for the friend’s wedding.

 

We were at some department store or other when her mother decided she wanted a new outfit and began to wonder where they kept the “women’s sizes.” “Let’s go see if they have women’s sizes,” she said, and began to wander the store. I followed, confused; there were a great many women’s clothes nearby. But as I listened it gradually dawned upon me that “women’s sizes” was not referring to “sizes for persons of the female sex,” but rather to “sizes for substantial persons of the female sex.”

 

First I thought it was just my friend’s mother’s peculiarity, but now that I work at a clothing store I have had a few customers come in inquiring as to where we keep our women’s sizes, so apparently that’s what they’re calling it now.

 

Because I am not nearly as rude outside of my head as I am in it, I generally reply with “I am sorry; our sizes run from zero to sixteen.” Then I will suggest a couple of stores for people with their specific size in mind.

 

What I do not do is stare at them in disbelief and go, “Of course! You will notice that four-fifths of our store is taken up with women’s clothing. Or did you mean particularly large women?”

 

Please understand. I have nothing against large women. What I have a problem with is that using the phrase “women’s sizes” for only large sizes excludes all the other women in the world who are not large and yet are still, you know, technically women. Me, for instance. I realize that marketers are forever struggling to come up with inoffensive phrases to describe sizes beyond 16,* but d’you think they could come up with one that doesn't exclude so many of their other consumers?

 

The very delicacy irks me. I myself have to buy what they call, last I checked anyway, which was a while ago, “petite,” which makes me sound like a waifish little pixie when in fact I look more like a Chris Sanders drawing than anything. I am not particularly small; I am on the short, curvy side of normal-sized, but the thing is that my ratio of torso-to-leg length is rather high, so that I have to hem all the pants I buy and I can’t wear capris because they make me look about two feet tall.** I would be totally fine going into a store and saying, “Do you have a section for people with stubby legs?” Which is probably some gross breach of etiquette, and they would have to come up with some genius codeword for those sizes. But it means that I often wonder why people don’t just say what they mean, and quit coming up with all these ridiculous euphemisms.

 

It never did cause me as much annoyance as now, though. I think this just went too far—there’s something so obnoxious about the new phrase. I mean, if they’re women, what are the rest of us?

 

 

In a related story, my siblings have gone down a different route for size euphemisms. They suggested the following:

 

Small

Medium

Large

Conservative

Patriot

All-American

 

My siblings are cynical bastards.

 

 

*Hell, they have a hard enough time getting women to buy size 8s if the women are totally convinced that the 8 is a temporary phenomenon and by next week they WILL be a 6 again because they are ALWAYS 6 GOD DAMMIT and they will NOT buy an 8 because they are NOT 8s and we must run small and there is NO WAY they are buying an 8 because they are a SIX FOR GOD’S SAKE. That sort of logic is hard to argue with.

 

**Which is actually a clever costuming strategy I noticed in the Lord of the Rings movies. One of the ploys they used to make the hobbits look diminutive was to give them all pants that were cut to exactly the length to make the wearers look like, well, hobbits.

Rained On Our Parade

Well, I was going to hike up to Lake Mary today with Mom, 妹, and maybe Afshan, and we were going to sit about and philosophize next to the sparkling waters of a pristine mountain lake.

 

But it’s all rainy, and none of us feels like getting muddy.

 

So I think I’m going to stay indoors and play dolls instead.