knickers

Washington Irving published A History of New York in 1809 under the pen name Diedrich Knickerbocker. The fictional historian was a bumbling Dutch-American chronicler whose name became shorthand for all Dutch settlers of old New Amsterdam. Irving's satire sold so widely that Knickerbocker entered American English as a general term for a New Yorker of Dutch descent. The New York Public Library held exhibitions about Irving's creation as late as the 1880s.

Illustrations accompanying Irving's book by caricaturist George Cruikshank showed his Dutchmen wearing wide, baggy breeches gathered below the knee. These became known as Knickerbocker trousers, and by the 1850s American tailors sold Knickerbocker suits as a fashionable boys' style. British tailors adopted the term by the 1860s and clipped it to knickerbockers for any loose trouser gathered at or below the knee. Golfers favoured them particularly.

By the 1880s, British English had shortened the word further to knickers and shifted its meaning toward women's undergarments. What began as a satirical Dutch caricature of outerwear became, in a single generation, an ordinary English word for intimate apparel. The 1895 Oxford English Dictionary already records the undergarment sense as established and unremarkable. The outerwear meaning persisted in America, but it was fading.

Today knickers marks one of the cleaner transatlantic divides in English. In Britain it means women's underpants with no ambiguity. In the United States the older breeches sense still lives in golf knickers and theatrical costume. The New York Knicks basketball team carries Irving's invented Dutchman forward without knowing it, and every game is, in small print, a memorial to an 1809 literary joke.