I just blew your mind, didn’t I?

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.)

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

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.

It got to be one of the ways adults proclaimed themselves to be hopelessly out-of-date and obsolete.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.

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.

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

No idea about jeans vs dungarees.

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