Pants-lower

Having posted on the back-formed verb shirt-lift a while ago — a verb based on the synthetic compounds shirt-lifting and shirt-lifter (in two families of senses) — I had hopes of coming across the corresponding verb pants-lower (with pants either in the mostly U.S. sense ‘trousers’ or in the sense ‘underpants’). Certainly, visual depictions of the act in question are easy to find in some places, and you can find plenty of references to pants-lowering on the web, indeed references to many different kinds of pants-lowering, from hip-hop pants-lowering to ordinary pants-lowering in undressing and the like.

I was particularly interested in pants-lowering as a sexual display, analogous to the “torso display” kind of shirt-lifting. Here’s a relatively modest example from an underwear ad (primarily aimed at a gay male audience — men who can both appreciate the display and identify with the model):

The model is shown on the right performing a first-stage pants-lowering maneuver, the beginning of a strip tease. We don’t see any pubic hair (but maybe he shaves his pubes), and not even the base of his penis.

On linguistic matters: lots of relevant hits for the synthetic compound pants-lowering, but (unsurprisingly) none for the awkward synthetic compound pants-lowerer. And none for back-formed verb to pants-lower, though you can imagine situations where it could be useful. Maybe it will crop up eventually; fresh 2-part back-formed verbs turn up with some regularity.

Leave a Reply


%d bloggers like this: