First day of new job. Panic! What to wear? Must buy outfit. Off to shopping centre. Go! Where to? Ahh – the green lights. It must be M&S. Run in. Clothes section. Stop.
And there it was. The sign: TREGGINGS. Like it was just a normal word you’d put on a sign. Treggings. Seeing this to advertise formal attire was, in my opinion, ridiculous. In my haste I thought I’d misread it. But no.
Is Treggings in the dictionary? Who knows? Who cares! OK, a quick Google shows Wikipedia cares – but then again it cares about Butlins. Anyway on a more ‘serious’ note, Oxford Dictionaries online defines them as:
‘Women’s leggings that are designed to resemble a pair of trousers’.
Oh – so leggings, then? Not quite. The overall web consensus is they’re basically leggings, but a bit thicker. A stretchy trouser, if you will? No – not that either, as Wiki’s sorrowful anecdote dictates:
There has been some controversy about whether they can be considered trousers. A British school decided to send 60 students showing up in treggings home on the reason that the clothing was too tight to be worn as trousers.
I mean, setting the place on fire’s one thing. Who can blame the kids for their fashion faux-pas if it’s all so bloody confusing? The head teacher never had treggings in his day, evidently (what a loser!).
It seems I’m behind the times. Apparently, Treggings first appeared circa late 2007. Casual treggings, anyway. Primark treggings. I’d fully expect Primark to have a sign in flashing lights with ‘Treggings’ written on it, possibly a different colour for every letter, causing tweenagers to go delirious with lust.
But now with M&S jumping on the bandwagon, while to advertise ‘smart’ treggings, it just looks plain wrong. A portmanteau of leggings and trousers, I guess the temptation to combine the two words was all too great. But this is M&S, for god’s sake. Can you really imagine that woman breathing, ‘These aren’t just treggings…’ See! Ridiculous.
They may as well come up with ‘Blumper’ and scrawl that on a sign. Oh, you don’t know what a Blumper is? It’s like, a cross between a blouse and a jumper – stay with me on this! It’s gonna be massive!
I personally can’t wait for the upcoming shirt and tights combination. This isn’t just a sign, M&S – this is a swear sign.