Arnold Zwicky's Blog

🐅 🐅 🐅  three tigers for ultimate January, and a day continuing the theme of late-January early-death birthdays: Robert Burns, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Edward Sapir in an earlier posting of mine (“Luminous birthdays” from 1/26); now, Anton Chekhov two days ago and Franz Schubert today

Meanwhile, tigers savage rabbits, but the rabbits of February are clamoring at the door, growing in size and ferocity, and are now prepared to chew up the tigers like mere blades of grass. A monument in bread to the coming triumph of these adorable but gigantic bunnies:

(#1) Today: from Benita Bendon Campbell, who got it from Jacqueline Martinez Wells

Now about headgear. It started with my 1/19 posting “Hats off to the vampires!”, about this Bizarro cartoon:

(#2)  The male nosferatu (holding a wineglass of what is presumably blood, and chatting with his young female companion at some sort of vampiric meet-and-greet) seems to be wearing a Canadian toque (= tuque), with pom-pom, to warm his head during the cold dark nights in his coffin (yes, it’s very silly)

First, that CaE toque, known in the AmE of my youth variously as a

knitted cap / knit cap / winter cap / winter hat / watch cap (and probably other names as well)

Then, a 1/21 exchange on Facebook that began with Ruth Lawrence, in Australia, exclaiming about the headgear in #2: a beanie!. Which set off discussion about who calls what a beanie.

Toques by any name. Two currently available examples of the headgear (CaE toques), from American companies:

(#3) A plain knit cap from L.L. Bean, in Freeport ME

(#4) A knit cap with pom-pom from the Aspen Collection, in Aspen CO

They come in many colors and patterns, of course.

They’re beanies, baby. Now to Facebook on 1/21:

— Ruth Lawrence: a beanie!

— AZ > RL: Wouldn’t count as a beanie in AmE, where beanies are close-fitting cloth caps, not knit, and don’t have rims or pompoms. But AuE might be different.

— RL: ’tis!

— Mike Pope: Lynnequist [Lynne Murphy] wrote about this recently [on 12/24 on her blog Separated by a Common Language, about “beanie (hat)”]

AZ > MP: And Lynne has some nice photos too.

My original comment about beanie reflects my usage from childhood on. The usage in NOAD:

noun beanie: a small close-fitting hat worn on the back of the head. ORIGIN 1940s (originally US): perhaps from bean (in the sense ‘head’) + –ie.

The OED beanie entry, from 1972, has only this meaning, with its 1st cite in 1943, from Mademoiselle, then has cites from Vogue and Mary McCarthy (all of them American).  Then from 1966, this cite from Punch — Model girls snapping up … tiny beanie hats —  showing that close-fitting headgear beanie had crossed the Atlantic.

LM documents on her blog a shift in the BrE usage of beanie from its AmE sense (for headgear of little consequence to Britons) to reference for things like #2 and #3 (commonplace items of great utility). Not an unreasonable shift, since the close-fitting cloth headgear and the knitted headgear are similar, and both lack the brims and crowns of men’s hats and the bills of men’s caps.

In any case, beanie for things like #2 and #3 became the common term, and that shift in usage happened in both BrE and AuE.

And then, LM reports, knitted-cap beanie spread back from the UK to the US, where it’s now widespread. Indeed, it appears that almost all the beanies on sale in the US now are in fact knitted caps (CaE toques). L.L. Bean sells #2 under the cute name L.L. Beanie; and the Aspen Collection sells #3 under the name Glade Pom Beanie. While I wasn’t watching, the world changed under my feet.

This entry was posted on January 31, 2025 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Clothing, Events and occasions, Hats, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Variation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.