Origin of “Whistle Britches”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi. This is Marshall from Point, Texas, calling you.

Okay, very cool. Well, what are you calling us about?

Oh, very simple. I have roots from East Texas from my grandparents and parents, although I wasn’t born here.

And, you know, years ago in elementary school or so, I would do the one- or two-week visit to my grandparents in East Texas, and the name of that town was Center.

And Center was the typical courthouse in the center of the square with all the live oaks and all the old men sitting on the benches whittling.

And as a little boy, I would sit there and whittle with all the old men. All they did with their long pieces of cedar is make a bunch of sticks.

Right. Didn’t carve anything whatsoever.

But it was the expressions I would hear from the people. And one of them I always had a question about.

And it was whistle britches. And how it was used is my grandfather, one of the other old guys, would point to someone across the street and they’ll say, oh, there’s old whistlebritches.

And so I was always wondering, well, what do they mean by whistlebritches?

And so here recently I looked it up and it talked about how whistlebritches comes from the sound of corduroy pants.

Well, I’ll tell you, if you see these old men from East Texas back in the 1960s, it was wool and khaki and wingtips and fedoras.

And none of those men had any whistling britches on them.

So I guess the question is, is it really corduroy pants since corduroy doesn’t exist in East Texas?

Well, it probably started as corduroy, right? You got that zh, zh, zh, zh noise.

Well, that’s what I looked up. It had corduroy, and I was like, I don’t know, how would they ever have come up with whistlebritches to name people pointing to them across the street?

They also called them hoofits every once in a while.

Hoofits?

Yeah, hoofits. I don’t know why. Here comes hoofits.

But whistlebritches is the most colorful term. So it probably did come from the corduroy.

It dates back to the late 1800s, but it easily left that and started to be used in a derogatory kind of joking way about somebody who has that ostentatious sound about them.

It’s kind of hard to annoy that of corduroy pants rubbing together.

It’s kind of like when a woman wears these particular kind of shoes with the very wooden clompy heels, and she’s drawing eyes wherever she goes, because everyone’s like, who’s making the clumpity clump noise?

How would that travel to East Texas where there is no corduroy?

How do they speak English there? It travels with the language. Baggage is along with everything else.

They don’t speak English in East Texas. They speak Texan. That is true.

You have a point there, Marshall.

Well then, there’s another theory too which has to do with flatulence, and I’ll let you figure that one out on your own.

Okay, okay. Because you can call somebody an old fart, right? And so maybe it’s just another way of referring to them.

You’re not putting them down hard. It’s just a gentle put down. They do have beans there, right? So there’s a possibility there too.

Take your pick. Maybe the flatulence theory works better for you than the corduroy theory.

But the corduroy one is pretty solid. We’ve got some evidence in the historical record and a variety of fiction contexts where people talk about whistlebritches and talk specifically about corduroy.

Or whistlebreeches is the older form.

Right, right. Well, maybe one day I’ll figure out hoofits too, but I don’t know where that one came from.

Hoofits, yeah. Somebody clomping their way through, right?

Yeah, it could be like, who’s it?

Who’s it, yeah. Well, it’s just like when I lived in Indianapolis, there was an expression.

You know how we always use the we must sing from the same hymnal? There was the expression that they used called, now we’ve got to be talking from the same bucket.

Oh, talking from the same bucket. See, I’ve lived in six states and worked in six states, and talking from the same bucket never figured that one out.

That’s a new one. Grant’s making a note.

I don’t know that one.

Hey, Marshall, this has been fun. Thank you so much for calling.

Thanks, bud.

No problem. I appreciate it.

Okay, take care. Goodbye.

Bye-bye.

Do you use the word britches?

I do, actually. I got it from my grandmother.

There was a period when I was very young, around two or so, where my brother and I were in the care of my grandmother, who was a classic Southeast Missouri kind of farm culture.

And she just, with no irony, just said, pull up your britches.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can hear Aunt Mazo from Western North Carolina. Martha Ann, get your britches on.

And so it’s happened where I have been in a public place. Actually, it was at a store where I was helping my son try on some pants.

And I said, well, pull the britches up. And some lady nearby said to me, she’s like, really? I’m like, what?

She’s like, britches. As if I were somehow making a joke. Some kind of affectation.

I’m like, no, britches. Britches are real. This is what my grandmother Barrett said. Britches are real. Pull up your britches.

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