‘They should say, irritation, not iteration,’ exclaimed my husband as a voice on the wireless spoke about men’s fashion and the promise of ‘a new iteration of softer suiting’.
Suiting in itself is a comical word when found outside the technical pages of Tailor and Cutter. In that respect it belongs to the same family as trouserings, which P.G. Wodehouse (already convinced that trousers are inherently absurd) liked to deploy. Bertie Wooster often referred to evening-wear trouserings. Similarly, the determinedly humorous Owen Seaman, born over an artificial-flower shop, and editor of Punch from 1906 to 1932, cheered up a parody of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with lines like ‘We sit in sable Trouserings and Boots.’ Quite separately the verb to trouser came to mean stowing profit, licit or not.
Nonetheless, my husband’s gripe was with iteration.
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