Long Johns

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Clinton from Brooklyn, New York.

Oh, hi, Clinton. Welcome to the show.

Thanks.

I actually had a question about the term long johns. A friend and I were playing chess, and long story short, he made a wrong move, and I told him I was getting my long johns in a tizzy, and he wasn’t familiar with the word. And I noticed that not many people around these parts say long johns. They say thermals or long underwear. I’m originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and everyone back home always says long johns. I was wondering how that term came about.

Don’t get your long johns in a tizzy.

Yeah, we said long johns in Missouri when I was growing up. It’s a great, what shall we say, a great genre of expressions involving…

Words for underwear?

Well, I was going to say ways to tell people to calm down that have to do with their underwear. You know, I mean, I’ve seen don’t get your long johns in a bunch. Don’t get your long johns bundled up in your breeches. In a twist. Yeah, don’t get your knickers in a twist. Don’t get your knickers in a knot. And the favorite one that I grew up with was don’t get your bowels in an uproar.

So you guys are sitting around a chess board talking about underwear being twisted.

Yeah, yeah, it was really cold that day, too.

Yeah, that’s pretty twisted, Clinton.

So where does the word long johns come from?

That is a great question, and I’m afraid it’s one of those origin unknown words. I have seen one suggestion that it might have to do with John L. Sullivan. Do you know the champion boxer from the 1880s, early 1890s? You see photos of him from time to time, and he’s standing there kind of posing with his arms out and his fists clenched, and he’s wearing what looked like long johns.

Wait, they have that texture to them, that kind of small waffle texture that Long John seemed to have?

Well, I didn’t get that close enough to look, but it’s definitely the shape, just the kind of tight-fitting. It looks like long underwear, and he’s there bare-chested. We could put a picture of him on our website for an example.

I do know that there was a newspaper in the 1940s that referred to Long John’s and said that that’s where the name came from. And usually those kinds of stories are pretty iffy, but I don’t know. We don’t have a better answer for it unless you know one, Grant.

So he was wearing these?

Well, I don’t think that John Sullivan was boxing in long underwear, but he was wearing, I don’t know what you would call those things. They’re really tight-fitting. They almost look silky trousers.

But there’s a bit of a historical gap there, right?

Yes.

The Long John’s term comes from the 1940s, and Sullivan was a boxster in what period?

The 1880s or something like that?

1880s, early 1890s.

Right. So that is entirely too large of a gap for that term to lay dormant and then suddenly pop up in the 1940s, at least as far as I can imagine.

Yeah.

Unless there was a movie made about Sullivan, and maybe it’s from the movie Sullivan instead of the original. I don’t know. It’s always hard to say on this kind of stuff. But that is an answer. I don’t know is a good answer because you could find many kind of harebrained theories about this that might lead you astray. And we’re actually giving you the straight dope, which is nobody knows. If they tell you they know, they’re full of it. And you can have them call us and we’ll tell them so.

So, Clinton, who won the game?

That’d be me.

All right.

Well, Clinton, thank you so much for giving us a ring.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Best of luck to you.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

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