Matt Heath: who wears the pant?

Pant or pants? Does anyone care? Photo / Guy Coombes.

My beloved grandmother would often say to me 'I love your new pant', 'where did you get your pant' and 'you have soiled your pant'. She was a great New Zealander. She made delicious stew. She could lift serious kilograms deep into her 80s and she told terrifying bedtime stories. Her only fault was the use of the single 'pant' instead of the plural 'pants' when referring to trousers.

There are significant issues facing New Zealanders at the moment: lockdowns, housing and the imminent return of the console wars. I think we all agree this is not the time to use crucial column cms in the national paper to discus trousers.

Having said that, why do we say pants and not pant? They are a single thing. When you put on a top, you don't say 'I have slipped on my t-shirts'. To get to the bottom of this, I undertook an extensive 0.63 second investigation.

Interestingly I used the DuckDuckGo search engine, not Google. DDG are one of the good guys of the internet. When you 'Google' you become their product to sell. You get milked and hocked to advertisers. They use every addictive trick they can to keep your attention. They desire as many seconds of your life as they can take. If they have to get you angry to take that time they will. Your data, mental health and feelings of goodwill to fellow New Zealanders are sucked from your existence and auctioned to the highest bidder. DuckDuckGo doesn't do that.

We the humans need to fight back against the heartless algorithms of Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and the other big tech monsters. We can start by turning off their notifications, so they don't get to choose when they interrupt our lives. We can seek real person to person, face to face interactions over gamed online communication. If you're advertising a product, you can choose to avoid the big evil guys and go local. The rest of us can pledge to ignore the adverts targeting us. This one is easy to achieve. No one views the ads on big tech anyway. Some people stare at the 'skip ad' buttons as the seconds countdown, but that's about it.

Anyway back to my grandmother's pant. The most exciting answer I found to the pant, pants dilemma was at britannica.com. Britannica isn't selling encyclopaedia door-to-door anymore, but they can still answer a question.

According to them pants were called pantaloons in the old days and consisted of two separate items, one for each leg. They were put on one at a time and hitched together in the middle with additional straps. It made sense to use the plural to describe them as they were two.

Jeans or jean, pant or pants? Photo / 123Rf

You put your pant on one at a time and then you were wearing pants. Eventually, the two garments became one, connected with a seat, gusset and finally a fly. Hence pants. It makes sense. Glasses and scissors are both singular items with two bits to them. Sadly there is no strong historical evidence to back up this pant unification theory.

Anyway back to evil big tech. It's you patriotic duty to do everything you can to stop these greedy foreign tech companies from destroying our happy little society.

Wikipedia are good guys too. According to them humans have been wearing strides with two legs connected in the middle since the 13th century BC. Archaeologists found trousers on an ancient mummy in Turpan, Xinjiang, western China. If people have been wearing trousers joined in the middle for 3000 years it seems odd that we would still be seeing them as two things.

Maybe we are merely dealing with a plural noun here. Whatever you call your pants for some reason they feature an 's' at the end. Trousers, slacks, breeches, strides, knickerbockers, britches, dungarees and pants. No one ever says 'I like your new jean'.

Was my lovely grandmother right to call my pants pant? Should this column have been written during this challenging period? The jury is out. I do know one thing - I didn't look any of this up on Google or Facebook, so their evil targeted pant related advertising won't get me this time. Unless of course they were secretly listening to me.