there's nothing like a tight end in frilly pants

Following on from my pointless bitching at the tail-end of the last post, here's another thing that always strikes me as odd - more in amusement than anger this time.

Have you noticed how people mangle the fairly simple French word lingerie? You know, bras and pants and stuff. I don't know (just as an aside) if there's some sort of ISO standard for the threshold of skimpiness and frilliness which marks the boundary between bog-standard "underwear" and Sunday-best "lingerie", but clearly some sort of dividing line exists, however arbitrary. Anyway, while standard French pronunciation would require the word to be rendered "lan-jer-ee", with the middle syllable all but swallowed if you're doing a proper French accent, more often than not people render it "lon-jer-ay" for reasons I can't begin to imagine. The Wikipedia article linked above reckons this a specifically US pronunciation, but I've heard it in the UK as well, probably more often that the proper one in fact (though I should point out that I don't hang out in social circles where the word lingerie crops up all that much in day-to-day conversation).

More importantly the picture on the right isn't posed, or at least not in quite the way you might think; no, there really is a Lingerie Football League (in America, naturally) where young ladies play American football while wearing their underwear (and a token amount of protective clothing). I think I'm right in saying that this is the most awesome sport ever invented anywhere, ever.