MekongMouse wrote:bigphatt wrote:biloeboy wrote:"Wife beaters", at least in Australia, has only been a term for maybe 10 years.Funny none of you Aussies remember a bloke called Jackie Howe. That's what my Grand dad always called those blue singlet thingies "Where's my Jackie Howe mum?" Then again, he was born in Barcaldine and was ( among other things) a shearer. But what would he know ay?
I have never heard them called a wife beater back home in Oz..
I thought it was just another K440 beat-up on something that a few posters don't like and so try, as hard as their fingers can type, to make a point to each other in a lame attempt to justify the stupid.
Or maybe it is that some have more weight than they care to show (obese slobs do look a little suss in singlets) and/or, have more hair on their back and shoulders compared to their head and are too shy to wear a comfortable singlet.
I have heard them called a Jackie Howe, for sure.. Very much a shearers name, I think.
"a blast from the past".. because I'm just a pup
Definitely not a 440 invention. I'm not sure of the origin, but I've never known them under any other term.
Don't know how reliable this is, but one explanation is as follows:
In 1947, Detroit, Michigan police arrested a local man (James Hartford, Jr.) for beating his wife to death. For months after that arrest, the local news stations aired the arrest and elements of the case ad nauseum, constantly showing the picture of Mr. Hartford, being arrested wearing a dirty tank top with baked bean stains on it. The media constantly referred to him as the wife beater".
Ever since then, men wearing dirty tank-topped undershirts were referred to as people who were wearing wife-beaters
Later that year "A Streetcar Named Desire" opened on Broadway to rave reviews. The Broadway production was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden and the main character Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando) wore the same type of shirt and was a woman abuser.
In the 1951 film version, Marlon Brando's wearing of the shirt added rocket fuel to the "wife beater shirt" fire
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