Our conversation about the phrase pain in the pinny and its relationship to the word pinafore prompted Susan from Eugene, Oregon, to share a memory of wearing pinnies in gym class. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Gym Class Pinnies”
We heard from Susan Gallant in Eugene, Oregon, who was writing about our conversation about the term pain in the penny. Remember that one?
Yeah, that’s when you have something hurts you in your abdomen and penny’s short for pinafore.
Exactly. And that jogged a memory for Susan. She writes, when I was in school in California back in the 60s, during PE, we would sometimes be divided into teams to play sports. Since we were all dressed identically in our gym clothes, we needed a way to distinguish between the two teams. For that purpose, we had something called pennies, made of a colored canvas apron-like garment, which was basically two squares with straps. You pulled it over your head and tied the sides, and it hadn’t occurred to me at the time that that name probably came from pinafore. So funny to have an epiphany nearly 60 years later.
That’s wonderful.
But that happens all the time, right? Where you just have this moment like two neurons fire that have never fired together before. The puzzle pieces fit.
They do. And it did for me, too, because we had those stupid pennies when I was in gym class. We had these really ugly sort of canvas blue gym suits with elastic on the thigh. It was awful. And, yeah, to divide up to play girls basketball, which at the time was six players on a team, as I recall. And one stayed on each side of the court and didn’t run because I guess we were just, you know, too delicate to run all the way up and down the court. But one team would wear pennies. And I always thought that was a weird term at the time because, of course, I was in the South and pennies, pennies.
But anyway, yes.
Right, the vowels. I messed it up.
Yeah, I think we, by the time I got to school, we didn’t use anything that you pulled over. And we didn’t do shirts and skins necessarily in school. No, I think they just borrowed the flag football flags. And so you just had the flag football flags on to show one side or the other.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, even if you weren’t playing flag football. So that’s how you divide it up. If you’re searching for a linguistic epiphany, this is the place, 877-929-9673.
