I have an older character, who lives in upstate NY and has pretty much her whole life, who refers to jeans as “dungarees”. I had her use that word after consulting with friends from upstate who remembered people of their grandparents’ generation and older using that word. I have been challenged on this by someone who thought the word was Australian. Absolutely not.1
I’m looking for more evidence than just my upstate New Yorker friends’ say so. Thus far I’ve found this in wikipedia which lists the word as archaic for the New York City area. But am coming up blank on other supporting evidence.
Can any of you help me?
Thanks in advance!
- I suspect I’m going to cop that a lot with the Liar book—people assuming I’ve gotten things wrong—like having New Yorkers saying they’re waiting “on line”—when, in fact, I’ve gotten it right, but they just don’t happen to know some of the local New Yorker dialect. Many USians assume that all USians talk the same. So not true! [↩]
If you give me permission, I will post this on the American Dialect Society mailing list.
Aside from that: I’m from rural Ulster County NY, I’ll be 66.6 years old in September — and I distinctly remember “dungarees” being used.
Tangent: I was once amused to see “youse” in a list of Australianisms which Americans wouldn’t understand. As you probably know, it’s also obsolete NYC colloquial. (I understand it’s originally from Ireland.)
Hah! I’m Australian and I always thought dungarees meant cargo pants!
I remember reading children’s books (I read a lot of OLD books) referring to dungarees, but I didn’t know exactly what they were. It’s definitely not an Australian term (which obviously you know) though you can see why non-Australians might think so – it has a very ‘kangaroo’ ‘Woolongong’ kind of sound to it.
My mother (b. 1921) grew up in Ohio and Michigan and I can remember her speaking of jeans as dungarees.
I grew up referring to overall-type things: pants with bibs and straps that went over your shoulders as dungarees
My Grandma would call jeans dungarees. She grew up in New Jersey, which is pretty close in terms of dialect.
Dan: If you give me permission, I will post this on the American Dialect Society mailing list.
That would be fantastic! Thank you. I love proving to editors that I’m right and they’re wrong. 🙂
I was once amused to see “youse” in a list of Australianisms which Americans wouldn’t understand. As you probably know, it’s also obsolete NYC colloquial.
Not obsolete! I’ve heard New Yorkers and New Jersey types use it and I’ve only been in NYC (on and off) since 1999. I was dead surprised the first time I heard it. I honestly thought it was solely Australian. I was also surprised the first time I heard a New Yorker use “arvo” to mean afternoon.
Isn’t it prudent to be looking for evidence that refutes your idea rather than focusing on evidence to confirm it? In any case — most of the Americans I know from across the country are well aware that their countryfolk across the country speak differently. Are your naysayers teens? I do recall learning a lot when I went to college in the east coast from Michigan.
To stand on line is hallowed tradition in Newyorkese! And whoever is telling you to change it appears unfamiliar with the fact that we all, teens and adults alike, absorb patterns and interpret them and normalize them without a lot of difficulty.
“Dungarees” is a slightly-archaic but perfectly alive word to me; it’s older-sounding than “high-tops” but quite a bit newer than “cravat” or “girdle.”
Not directly relevant, but amusing story…
A certain choir director was born in China but who spent many years in the New York area and landed ultimately in Boston. One of her choristers, who is quite a character in his own right, came in to church one morning wearing blue jeans.
“Aaaa*. Dungarees. Roll them up.”
So he rolled up his pant legs far enough that they wouldn’t show under his choir robe.
“Aaaaa. White socks. Roll them down again.”
*This utterance is utterly unspellable; it might be like the AAAK of Bill The Cat (from Bloom County), without the final consonant.
Dungarees – ie bibbed trousers and with over-shoulder straps, not just straightforward jeans – were certainly pretty common for women in the UK in the 1970s, where they often had a specific cachet: “So why do people still think that feminists are dungaree-wearing, man-hating maniacs with armpit hair you could knit a jumper out of?” says UK feminist site The F-Word. I wonder if that was the case in the USA or elsewhere?
They weren’t exclusively for man-haters, mind – here’s my girlfriend and me in the summer of 1978, though come to look at it, she does seem to be fighting me off.
Looking in my dictionary, it comes from the Hindi dungri for a coarse calico cloth or overalls made from same and has been in English since 1696, so you’d have thought – what with the tides of Trade and Empire – thate east coast North Americans would have had the word at some point.
I’ve heard people in the UK say youse as well, though according to the Wiktionary it’s plural here, but singlular in New York. Arvo I associate with South Africans.
My New Yorker college roommate said “on line.”
She also insisted that I pronounced my home state of “Flahrrr-i-da” incorrectly. “You know, Flahrrr-i-da, where they grow ahrrranges.”
I say “flor-da.”
Apparently growing up there does not trump the knowledge her grandparents gained when they retired there. The problem with going to college in a place filled with New Yorkers is that I was the first Floridian they’d ever met under 60.
My grandparents would have said “dungarees,” and I’m from Connecticut. Also, “on line” is still in use around here, though it’s not so much my idiolect.
I grew up in Philadelphia, and am in my 40s. Some of my friends growing up said “dungarees” — it wasn’t the most common term, but enough people said it that everyone knew what it meant.
I was reading a Stephen King story yesterday (in his new collection, uw, whatsit, Just before Midnight?), and in it, one of the older white male characters referred to his jeans as dungarees. King’s people all come from Maine when they use what I think of as Weird Language. So I think you’re good!
I remember that that the word “dungarees” was used during my childhood by older adults, that it was used in older ya stories, and that I have still heard the word used in commercials and by others to this very day. Yes, I say use it in your liar story. The word is right on target for the time period.
My farming grandparents referred to denim overalls as dungarees, but that was in Michigan.
My parents grew up in NYC in the 30s, and they don’t say ‘dungarees’ anymore but I can remember hearing it as a child, possibly from my grandmother. I think it is just an old-fashioned term.
I remember hearing characters in the movie Big refer to jeans as dungarees. They were not old, and the movie was made in the 80s.
My mother, born in 1942 in Massachusetts, says dungarees, as did her mother, also born in MA.
My great-grandmother — who was a North Carolina southerner and a young girl during the Great Depression — always said “dungarees.” Which probably isn’t helpful. For me the word has always skewed old, but not necessarily regional, though I guess I assumed it was southern.
Boston. My parents (65) would sometimes refer to jeans as dungarees. No-one in my generation (36) would. Interestingly, they don’t seem to use the word anymore. Perhaps the Boomer generation is the cutoff.
I once had a Bronx Jewish friend, born during WWII, who referred to a denim jacket (sans jeans styling, more like a sport coat instead) as his “dungaree jacket”.
Dear Justine,
I corroborate what Don says. My Boston parents (now deceased) called jeans “dungarees” during the 1960s. Curiously, both served in World War II, Dad in the Pacific and Mom in the Midwest and Washington DC, so either may have picked it up somewhere other than Boston.
– John
Grandma always called them dungarees. Born in 1910, in Michigan.
Waiting “on line” is totally a way to spot a New Yorker. I had no idea it was a NY thing until I moved out of state and everyone kept telling me “on line is for computers. you mean in line.”
No idea about jeans vs dungarees.
Hi, Justine.
Here’s a quote from Georgina O’Hara’s “Encyclopaedia of Fashion”:
“Dungarees were used by workmen in the early 20th century and adopted by women during both world wars. In the late 1940s and early 1950s denim dungarees became fashionable. Dungarees consist of pants and a bib panel with shoulder straps.”
And a quote from Morris’s “Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins”:
“Dungarees became the standard work uniform of the navy and merchant marine… The present popularity of dungarees can be traced, at least in part, to the fact that millions of young Americans wore them for the first time during World War II.”
— Lisa Gold, Research Maven
I grew up in Schenectady, NY ( fled for Seattle) and always called dungarees jeans, but I do recall my mom saying dungarees. I’m your age if that helps. Where in Upstate, NY is your book set? BTW, I am a strong advocate of not wearing a complete jean outfit — looks too farmy.
Judy Blume certainly favoured dungarees.
From Are You There God It’s Me Margaret:
‘The chaperones were dressed funny, Like farmers or something. I mean, Nancy’s mother wore dungarees, a plaid shirt and a big straw hat.’
I have a feeling Trixie Beldon also got about in dungarees.
Growing up in the Philadelphia area in the mid-70s the term dungarees was common enough that I knew what you meant immediately. It wasn’t used widely, and I had the impression that it was an term used by the older people around Philly.
I’m Australian and the only time I ever came across ‘dungarees’ was when reading Trixie Belden as a kid. Anybody else remember those books? I used to love them. They were set in New York. I always assumed that dungarees were jeans.
Oops! I see someone else already mentioned this. Actually, come to think of it, I thought they might have been denim overalls.
I live in Australia but grew up in New Hampshire, 60 miles north of Boston. I am in my 50s and grew up calling jeans dungarees. The overalls with the bib we called overalls. We also called soft drink ‘tonic’ and a thick shake a ‘frappe’.
I’m 47 years old, I grew up on Long Island, New York, and when I was a teen-ager and pre-teen adults pretty universally referred to jeans as “dungarees,” usually telling us it was inappropriate to wear them somewhere or another, which made us want to wear them all the more.
It got to be one of the ways adults proclaimed themselves to be hopelessly out-of-date and obsolete.
I’ve never heard bib overalls called dungarees.
I suppose the word “dungarees” is archaic, although that seems like an odd word to use in this context. I think of “archaic” words as being stuff from Elizabethan times, not language that’s only been out of use for a generation.
In day 568 of my life of Riley series, I got so frustrated with the new style of jeans currently on sale that I used the word “dungarees” by accident.
I’ve been on the Northeast coast of the US for a good portion of my life, so I can tell you it’s not just an Australian word. People who were old 30 years ago used this word. I also remember hearing “dungajeans” on rare occasion.
Jon: Just to be clear “dungarees” meaning jeans is not Australian. In fact, until this thread I had never heard of any Australian using that word. Where I grew up in Australia overalls were called overalls not “dungarees”.
From the American Dialect Society mailing list (ADS-L); there
are more posts:
Subject: Re: “dungarees”
From: Arnold Zwicky
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 11:27:10 -0800
To: dsgood@iphouse.com
On Feb 2, 2009, at 10:53 AM, Dan Goodman wrote:
>
>
> With permission, from the blog of an Australian-born fiction writer:
>
> Dungarees
>
> I have an older character, who lives in upstate NY and has pretty much
> her whole life, who refers to jeans as “dungarees”. I had her use that
> word after consulting with friends from upstate who remembered people of
> their grandparents’ generation and older using that word. I have been
> challenged on this by someone who thought the word was Australian.
> Absolutely not.
>
> I’m looking for more evidence than just my upstate New Yorker friends’
> say so. Thus far I’ve found this in wikipedia which lists the word as
> archaic for the New York City area. But am coming up blank on other
> supporting evidence.
the OED has cites from 1613 for the fabric, from 1891 for the trousers (all, i think, british; well, the first trousers cite is from Rudyard Kipling).
NOAD2 lists it without an usage or dialect note, as does AHD4.
back in the 40s and 50s in small-town southeastern pennsylvania, “dungarees” was the usual term, but it was succeeded by “(blue) jeans”, possibly because “dungarees” was associated with genuine work clothes, while “jeans” was associated with youth, informality, social protest, classlessness, and the like.
James Sullivan in _Jeans: A Culural History of an American Icon_ (2006) says (pp. 110-1) that “jeans” had taken over in the U.S. by the 60s, and eventually Levi Strauss & Co. changed their usage.
arnold
Jon (#25): “People who were old 30 years ago used this word.”
I agree. And of course by “old” I mean “about the same age I am now, maybe a little younger.” Heh.
Jon (#37) reminds me – Justine, when you say your character is “older,” how old do you mean? If the novel is set in the present-day, I should think the character would have to be in his or her 90s or maybe 70s, based on my personal experience. (And my personal experience is not necessarily the One Received Gospel Truth on this subject.)
Darn it, I meant “80s or maybe 70s,” not 90s.
My grandfather (born 1901 in Louisiana) always referred to jeans as dungarees. I lived in NYC from 1974 to 2005 and still use the term “on line” instead of “in line.”
Mitch: I meant older than me. She’s in her seventies and she DEFINITELY says dungarees. My informant’s grandfather in his 60s up Albany way still says dungarees. I feel perfectly justified. Especially given the isolation my character has lived in. But you’ll have to read the book to see what I mean.
Justine, I defer to your ninja novelist/researcher skills. Looking forward to reading the novel.
I was reminded listening to the Grammar Girl podcast this morning about another, related word: “Slacks,” used by people of the same generation who used the word “dungarees,” to describe dress pants. As in: “Do I need to wear a suit to this wedding?” “No, slacks and a sport jacket should be fine.”
I just blew your mind, didn’t I?
I haven’t read all the comments, and in just glancing you seem to have gotten all the confirmation you need, but just thought I’d give you a literary reference. I grew up reading the Trixie Belden series, which first came out in the 40s or 50s. Trixie lived in upstate New York in the Catskills, and when she came home from school she always changed into dungarees from her skirt as soon as she could. As a Midwestern girl growing up in the 80s, I had no idea what they were, but I always assumed they were comfortable pants or jeans.
I don’t know where the word comes from, but my grandma (who was born in a small town in Middlesex County, CT, and lived either there or in NYC for most of her life) always called jeans “dungarees” — and was always appalled to see my brother and me wearing them to school.
My mom (b 1937) who grew up in Harlem, NY, has said dungarees her whole life. But as kids (70s, 80s) we thought it was funny.
lived in brooklyn NY all my life. bought my first pair of dungarees in vinnies dungaree shop on flatlands avenue in brooklyn in 1973. i will never call them jeans. they will always be dungarees to me no matter how many times my kids correct me!!! long live dungarees!!!! thank you for allowing me to vent!!! LOL