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Topic: McCarthy's Western Novels
Thread: Gaitered shirts

Total messages for all days: 7

Gaitered shirts	Paulo Faria	12/4/2003
This is Paulo Faria, translating «Blood Meridian» into Portuguese. On p.324, when the final confrontation between the judge and the kid is about to begin, the kid enters the saloon and makes his way to the bar among «several men in gaitered shirts». What are «gaitered shirts»? I have read about gaitered trousers, but not gaitered shirts! Any help is welcome. Thanks to all that have helped me so far. Paulo Faria

Gaitered shirts	Paulo Faria	12/10/2003
Please don't leave me alone with these gaitered shirts! Paulo Faria

Gaitered shirts	dave	12/10/2003
Paulo, Your moving plea compels me to jump in here, even though I'm as mystified by "gaitered shirts" as everybody else seems to be. One definition of gaiter, however, is: "A high tubular collar fitting closely around the neck, often worn by skiers." I have seen a lot of neck gaiters for sale on the internet by vendors of outdoor wear. Perhaps a gaitered shirt was one that had a neck gaiter sewn on, or with a collar tall enough to serve as a neck gaiter when buttoned all the way up. For a while I had been toying with the notion that "gaitered" was actually a misprint for "gatored", indicating that the men were wearing Izod Lacoste polo shirts, but I eventually rejected that scenario as unlikely for several reasons.

Gaitered shirts	peterb	12/10/2003
Some shirts used to have a single notched strap-gaiter at the back so the wearer could notch it in and tighten the garment up. Conversely, he could loosen before bunking in and wear it as a nightshirt.

Gaitered shirts	DN Cremean	12/14/2003
We've all seen shirts with a gaitered collar, one that reaches up, not out and down (I hope this makes some sense). If memory serves me well, they are frequent apparel in various Westerns (I seem to remember Tommie Lee Jones frequently in one as Woodrow Call in _Lonesome Dove_, a movie McCarthy has professed loving so much that he refused--at least as of several years ago--to read the novel). These shirts indeed tend to wear tight around the neck, like in Dave's quotation above. My money's on that, but since I'm broke, mebbe thet don't mean much.

Gaitered shirts	BigDave	12/14/2003
I may be completely off-base, and confess to not knowing for sure, but I had an uncle who used to wear what looked like women's garterbelts around his upper arm to keep his shirtsleeves from drooping down past his hands...You often see these worn by card dealers in old time western movies...He called them gaiters.

Gaitered shirts	dave	12/19/2003
When I first read and responded to this post, I had given the line in question only the most cursory glance and blindly assumed that the men in gaitered shirts are patrons of the bar, frontiersmen just arrived from some remote wilderness where warm sturdy clothing would be essential. But now, having reread the passage and realized that the men in gaitered shirts are actually the bartenders, I'm feeling very small indeed. BigDave clearly has the right idea here. "Sleeve garters" is the only term Ive ever heard for what he describes, though -- but then, I've never met anybody who actually wore them. At any rate, it seems most reasonable to assume that the gaiters would be to protect the bartenders' shirts from the inevitable liquid mess of a saloon. Hiking the sleeves up would be one way to do that, but I'm wondering now if there weren't also some sort of protective gaiters of leather or canvas or something that would be worn over the cuffs and forearms ...and now I'm almost convinced that I've seen such a thing in some old west photograph somewhere, although more than likely this is actually a false memory that my subconscious is generating as I type. Apologies for all this useless noninformation. Maybe this whole thread is a case where I should have gone with the "don't speak -- don't be recognized" strategy.

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