Transcript of “Going Commando, A Topic for the Tropics”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Christine in Charleston, South Carolina.
Welcome, Christine. What can we do for you?
I swim daily, and I was in the ladies’ locker room, and I overheard in the changing cubicle next to me, apparently someone, a woman, had worn her street clothes over her bathing suit. Come, she swam, and then she had forgotten to bring any undergarments. So she sounded mortified by that. And she said, oh, and I don’t know who she was. I never did see her. She said, you know, and so she kind of worked it out aloud. And she said, I guess I’ll have to go home commando. And I said, you know, she didn’t know who I was. So I was in the adjacent cubicle. And I thought about that and I said, what does that mean? Does that mean nude or without support or what? And she didn’t answer me. And then eventually I said, do you know? And she said, no. So I never did find out and I couldn’t find anything. This is a former military economy here. And I just couldn’t find the answer. Where does commando come from vis-a-vis forgetting your undergarments?
Oh, yeah. So it’s going commando. The military town is possibly a connection to it being something that was in her vocabulary if she’s been around long enough. To go commando, yeah, it means to go without your underwear. Just to freewheel it, you know? And it probably comes from the military. The last time we talked about this on the show, we got a lot of really great emails from our listeners and phone calls, and many of them with military experience, including Marine officers and Navy SEALs. And they said that underwear can twist or bunch up or chafe during extreme drills or exercise or when you’re out in the field or on missions because of sweat and humidity in the climate. And so it often is better not to have them on because they can be a distraction or they can make you uncomfortable or make it hard to be as ambulatory or as flexible as you need to be, especially in jungles and humid climates. You can prevent jungle rot and other things that can happen in other places when there’s too much humidity. So that’s the use of it. But why commando? Why not? Because it was supposedly, and this I heard from numerous people in several branches of the military, many of them claiming to know this term from the Vietnam War. It was the commandos who figured this out. They were the ones most likely to be out there really exerting themselves and kind of getting the wisdom of the field and bringing it back to the camp. So it was the people who were paid to do the toughest jobs. So to go commando, it just came from the commandos, this wisdom. Doing as they did, yeah.
But so is commando a rank or what is that? In Italian, it’s from the verb meaning to command, to order. These are people who are ordered to go on a specific mission for a specific purpose. So a group of people using specialized skills are sent out to do a specific job and then come back.
Well, that’s it. That’s good. One of our listeners, Sean, who I think might be here in San Diego, he said he went through special forces training in the 80s. And the older soldiers passed down the advice to him and the other newbies to wear running shorts rather than underwear because of this problem.
Interesting.
So we find it as far back as the 1970s.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that’s very interesting. Thank you very much. I love these things. And I love your show. It’s really great.
Oh, our pleasure. Thank you for joining us, Christine.
My pleasure. Take care of yourself.
Bye now.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
