At breakfast last week, the day after one of the awards ceremonies, I commented on how inappropriate the T-shirt of one of the prize-winners had been. (I still think a thirteen year old at a prize giving ceremony shouldn't be wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the legend "Suck me off".)
However the point is that in our conversation I referred to it as "inappropriate wear", a perfectly commonplace idiom, only to be met with the reply that I couldn't use "wear" in that way. I was speaking with a colleague who is (and I hope he'll forgive me for saying so) an intelligent, well-educated, experienced, native-speaking English teacher and he said that he had never heard this use of "wear".
It didn't occur to me at the time to ask if he had heard of expressions such as "rainwear", "formal wear" or "evening wear".
It always strikes me as odd when I encounter such lexical gaps. Or am I mistaken. Is this a less commonplace use than I thought?
2 comments:
i can't remember if that was me or not. or whether I was just wear.
Don't forget I still ned your email address.
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