Things that time forgot.

[jean]

... do we have any evidence for this assertion?

(I edited my post after you quoted it, sorry.)

My evidence is that that's what I used to hear. The Guardian (link above) and Michael Quinion agree.

[vinteuil]

My evidence is that that's what I used to hear. The Guardian (link above) and Michael Quinion agree.

... and from the Guardian you quote -

"Works of reference are pretty much evenly divided on the matter. "

[Flay]

... do we have any evidence for this assertion?

Modern political life in a nutshell, jean...

Yes,they're alternative trousers

[HighlandDougie]

Michael Quinion agree.

"The form with the negative is certainly common. I can’t give you chapter and verse from direct experience, though I know that the BBC television programme Last of the Summer Wine — firmly based in Yorkshire — has always used your form, all mouth and trousers, as an effective put-down, by women especially, of a certain kind of sexually aggressive and over-confident man.
In the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green is also quite sure that the expression should lack a negative. He explains it as being a pairing of mouth, cheek or insolence, with trousers, a pushy sexual bravado, a fine double example of metonymy (“a container for the thing contained”).
I think Matthew Paris, like others who don’t know the origin of the expression, is trying to make sense of it by adding the no. And the other idioms he quotes are persuasive in supporting this faulty interpretation. It’s a lovely phrase, though, as good a put-down as anyone could want (all the better for being slightly obscure), and it’s one that ought to be preserved pristine. Eliminate the negative!"

[jean]

I think Matthew Paris, like others who don’t know the origin of the expression, is trying to make sense of it by adding the no.

I think so, too - especially the American websites which have never heard the expression in its original form.

[jean]

... and from the Guardian you quote -

"Works of reference are pretty much evenly divided on the matter. "

Yes, but even so, it doesn't think the 'no' is original.

The majority can sometimes be wrong, you know.

[Nick Armstrong]

[A pedant writes: It should be All mouth and trousers.]

As in All Gas and Gaiters...

... and by curious coincidence, tomorrow afternoon on Radio 4:

All Mouth and Trousers
Drama

Between 1966 and 1971, TV's first ecclesiastical comedy, All Gas and Gaiters was regularly enjoyed by over 10 million viewers. The series starred veteran farce actor Robertson Hare as the sherry-tippling Archdeacon, William Mervyn as the bombastic Bishop wedded to his comforts, Derek Nimmo in the role that made him a star as the Bishop's twittish Chaplain Noote, and John Barron as the stern, rule-bound Dean.

Mark Burgess's comedy features.....

[jean]

Well! What further proof could one need?

[vinteuil]

As in All Gas and Gaiters...

... Caliban, as a committed Dickensian, of course immediately got the reference. I, a not very committed Dickensian, had to search - and found : -

"...the original is in Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby of 1839, in which a mad old gentleman who has been paying his addresses to Mrs Nickleby arrives precipitously down the chimney of an upstairs chamber dressed only in his underwear. Then Miss La Creevy comes into the room, whom the old man immediately mistakes for Mrs Nickleby:

“Aha!” cried the old gentleman, folding his hands, and squeezing them with great force against each other. “I see her now; I see her now! My love, my life, my bride, my peerless beauty. She is come at last — at last — and all is gas and gaiters!”

This must have been incomprehensible to Dickens’s readers, who will have wondered what vapours and protective leg coverings had to do with the matter in hand. But when you consider what the old man had said immediately beforehand, incomprehensibility comes as no surprise:

“Very good,” said the old gentleman, raising his voice, “then bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew.” Nobody executing this order, the old gentleman, after a short pause, raised his voice again and demanded a thunder sandwich. This article not being forthcoming either, he requested to be served with a fricassee of boot-tops and goldfish sauce, and then laughing heartily, gratified his hearers with a very long, very loud, and most melodious bellow.

Despite its being nonsense (or possibly because it was), all is gas and gaiters became a well-known interjection. The original sense — as you will realise — was of a most satisfactory state of affairs. This is how nineteenth-century speakers used it and also clearly what Wodehouse meant by it. But another sense grew up in the twentieth century in which gaiters referred to the senior clergy — such as bishops and archbishops — because of their traditional dress that included those garments, and gas alluded to their supposedly meaningless eloquence. So all gas and gaiters has come to mean mere verbiage... "



.

[vinteuil]

The majority can sometimes be wrong, you know.

... good lord, I think they usually are! Have you been following recent referendums and elections?

[ahinton]

... good lord, I think they usually are! Have you been following recent referendums and elections?

DON'T MENTION THEM! (or the war, come to that) if the thread's to continue...

[ahinton]

That's the bit that doesn't convince me. Without the negatibve, the trousers are indeed there, but there nothing in them.

...One of the joys of language is that sometimes it is the little things that trigger the most intense debate. Such as one little word: "no". Or, more accurately, the difference between trousers and no trousers....

Yes, we have "no" brine trysers
We have "no" brine trysers today (or "to-day", as Mr Grew would have it)...

[vinteuil]

.


"Yes! We have no bananas... " *

m'self, I prefer the banjaxed syntax of

"Is you is or is you ain't my baby... " †

.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes!_We_Have_No_Bananas

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_You..._Ain't_My_Baby

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3FaxXQ8u74

[doversoul1]

… set in the long-gone era of VHS tapes and dial-up…

...the long-gone era...!!

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/20/universal-harvester-by-john-darnielle-review-mountain-goats