LATELY there has been a lot of controversy regarding the term “skirt journalism”. It is clearly evident everyone has gotten it quite wrong when they felt the term used was in some way meant to be a sexist reference, and in some way a derogatory connotation towards a female journalist.
Quite the contrary, and in fact, all of you have gotten it quite wrong when you alluded to its reference to a female wearing apparel, which was not the case, initially anyway.
Linguistic research shows “skirt” is an interesting word with interesting connections to other words.
The root of the English noun “skirt” is the Old Norse word “skyrta,” which is not very surprising given the Viking invasions of Britain which began in the 8th century left behind all sorts of words rooted in Old Norse.
What is a bit surprising is that the Old Norse “skyrta” doesn’t mean “skirt.” It means “shirt,” and, if you go a bit further back in history, you’ll find the Germanic root that produced the Norse “skyrta” (which became our English “skirt”) also produced the English word “shirt”.
In other words, “skirt” and “shirt” are basically the same word, except that “skirt” was filtered through Old Norse before it entered English, and “shirt” wasn’t.
But wait, there’s more. The Germanic root (“sker”) that eventually produced “skirt” and “shirt” meant “cut”, and also eventually produced our English adjective “short” (as well as “score,” “share,” “shear” and several other English words).
The original sense of both “shirt” and “skirt” was, in fact, simply “short garment”. The question, obviously, is how a “shirt” came to mean a loose tunic worn above the waist, primarily by men, and “skirt” came to mean the part of a woman’s dress below the waist (usually a separate garment).
The answer probably lies in the fact that the modern Icelandic word “skyrta” means a long shirt that hangs well below the waist, so perhaps the Viking “skyrta” was even longer.
In the centuries since “skirt” appeared in English around 1300, it has acquired a variety of figurative meanings, the most important, for our purposes, being “the border, rim, boundary or outlying part” of anything, including a town or village.
This sense comes by analogy to the loose bottom edge of a skirt, and we most often encounter it in the modern English term “outskirts”, meaning the outlying parts of a village, town or city.
As a verb, “to skirt” (which first appeared around 1600) reflected this “boundary” sense from the beginning. In its earliest uses, “to skirt” meant “to border or form a border around something — ‘Those vast and trackless forests that skirted the settlements’,” for example.
But “to skirt” was also used to mean “to travel through the outskirts of a place”, and specifically to pass around, rather than directly through, a town, village or other place:
“Then I set off up the valley, skirting along one side of it,” for example.
It is this sense of “skirt,” with the figurative meaning of “evade or dodge”, that we use when we speak of a politician “skirting” sensitive issues in a press conference, for instance.
Skirt journalism in this sense was not meant at all, in my personal opinion, as a sexist reference to the female journalist by the politician concerned. I feel that being an academic the politician was well aware of the meaning of the term “skirt journalism” — referring to a journalist (whether a male or female) “skirting or evading the issue in question or being discussed”.
No reference to a female skirt, which we now know that in fact historically a skirt was in fact a shirt worn by men and not women.
I hope this clarifies the issue that has been doing the rounds in Fiji and we note the MIDA chairman, from this interpretation, could have also been incorrect and needlessly accused the learned academic.
I feel we should not lose the plot and try to bring the issue of gender in everything that is under discussion especially when we ourselves may not be sure of what we are in fact saying.
* The views expressed are those of the author and not of this newspaper nor that of the author’s employer, the Fiji National University.
