At 08:56 AM 8/8/04 +0100, JENNIFER BARRON wrote: >What is a bodice sloper?
A sloper is basic pattern used to design patterns. The dictionary says that "slop" is from the same root as "slip" --- if you go way, way back --- but a "slop" was an overgarment where a "slip" is an undergarment. (Shared meaning: you slip into it.) Also came to mean cheap clothing and flimsy clothing, and "slops" are sailor's dirty-work clothes, but "sloppy" is from an old word meaning pool. But "sloppe" meaning pool also goes back to the root of "slip". That was one busy little root! Webster doesn't say what root "sloper" is from -- except in the sense of an instrument for determining the slope (also from the root of "slip") of a railway embankment. I'm betting "sloper" branched off from "cheap garment". "Sloper" for a paper pattern has to be fairly recent, since flat-pattern design was invented in the very early 20th Century -- paper was too expensive to use that way until then -- but it could have meant "tool for designing slops" for a long time before that. Dictionary makers, alas, don't care about dressmaking terms -- and before the Internet, most dressmakers didn't leave written records of how they talked, so the dictionary makers couldn't do much if they did care. But I don't have an O.E.D. No telling what data you can mine out of the Oxford English Dictionary. -- Joy Beeson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where it's cool enough to leave the windows open. To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
