Posted by Robert Dilley on 10/12/99 from geog-rc2006f.lakeheadu.ca:
In Reply to: Re: Girls'clothes in AR posted by Robert Hill on October 11, 1999 at 15:40:56:
When it gets down to minus forty here in winter, my daughters like to comment on the fact that I had to wear shorts (at boarding school) summer and winter until I was thirteen -- with, as noted, long socks supposedly held under the knee but which (in my case) invariably began to droop. My wife has said that her older brother wore shorts at school in Portugal, and that when they moved to Sudbury (the Ontario one) his mother sent him to scool (aged 10) in shorts without thinking twice about it, to the great delight of the other kids and his own intense mortification. My family is puzzled every summer at my refusal to join in the Canadian sartorial trend of switching to shorts the moment the snow is off the ground (i.e. June) and I have to keep explaining that, having been made to wear them for so long, they still represent childhood repression, not freedom. Incidentally, having first read AR in the late forties, I agree that even then "knickerbockers" seemed quaintly archaic (so did "stockings" for boys). Anybody got a theory where AR got these usages?