Today—in a roundabout sort of way—we mark the 1783 birth anniversary of Washington Irving. The purported author of History of New York—from the beginning of the world to the end of the Dutch Dynasty—was one Diedrich Knickerbocker, the pseudonym of Washington Irving. The success of that 1809 publication brought the word Knickerbocker—literally "marble baker" in Dutch—into the lexicon as a nickname for New Yorkers, descendants of that Dutch dynasty. (来源：英语杂志 http://www.EnglishCN.com)

For instance, the slangy Knickerbocracy encompassed the 400 socially elite New Yorkers of the late 1800s, while the Knicks, the NBA's New York basketball team, is more formally known as the Knickerbockers.

But Knickerbocker was also shortened to knickers and used (in American English) for loose-fitting short pants gathered at the knee. How did that come to pass?

Picture the paintings and drawings of those early Dutch settlers and you may recall long-ago male New Amsterdam-ers were commonly portrayed wearing those breeches. Within half a century after Washington Irving's pen name was first used as a nickname for New Yorkers, it—and then its shortened form, knickers—was being applied to the garb associated with those long-gone New Yorkers.