Not a suit town
A message on the Spokane-News facebook page, the ONLY source of real news, caught my attention....

So anyone important in town today...or maybe just training? Late morning near Gonzaga there were two SUVs rolling together 20 mph with tinted windows and some serious suits driving.

Probably doesn't amount to anything, but it's always good for citizens to keep track of suspicious-looking events. The truly salient part was serious suits. In many cities you wouldn't notice serious suits. Commonplace. In Spokane serious suits stand out like a giraffe.

On my morning walks I see a lot of people getting into their cars and leaving for work. I never see a suit. Mostly 'businesslike' clothes but no jackets or ties.

In the last few years the only time I saw suits was jury duty, and even in the courtroom only the judge and defendant were fully suited up. The prosecutor and defense lawyer were dressed in a 'businesslike' way but no jackets or ties.

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Irrelevant sidenote: The early '50s radio cop shows that I like to hear at bedtime illustrate a totally different vocabulary and attitude about clothing. When the 1952 culprit was wearing what I call a serious suit, the 1952 witnesses described his attire as "sports clothes". Sounds peculiar now. "Sports clothes" calls up an image of inappropriate Spandex. When a culprit was wearing what I call businesslike clothes, the 1952 witnesses would have said "he was dressed like a bum" and the cops would have looked for him on Skid Row.

If I remember correctly from what we learned in school dressup days, the term "sports clothes" meant that the jacket and pants were different colors, and a "sports jacket" was a jacket that was not the same color as the pants. This can't be right. Doesn't make a lick of sense. What happens if you're wearing "non-sports clothes", tan jacket and tan pants, and then you change to black pants? Now you're wearing "sports clothes" and the "non-sports jacket" has pulled a Dolezal. It has transed into a "sports jacket" without any actual change of fabric. How was this ontological miracle accomplished?

Labels: Heimatkunde

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