A Scientific Look At Why You Hate Hawaiian Shirts
Hawaiian Shirt Flickr/bobbi vie A couple jokes, from New Yorker cartoons: A penguin arrives at work with other penguins, except the arriving penguin is wearing a Hawaiian shirt. "You're kidding," he says. "I thought it was Friday.” A priest in a Hawaiian shirt is delivering a sermon: "And on the seventh day..." he begins. The caption reads "Casual Sunday.” These, and so, so many more pieces of cultural ephemera, appear in the scientific paper "Funny Kine Clothes: The Hawaiian Shirt As Popular Culture," published in the Journal for Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Studies, a document I would invite you to read every word of ASAP. Its two authors, University of Hawaii at Manoa's Marcia Morgado and Andrew Reilly, pored over decades' worth of cartoons, stock photos, and articles, then applied Chomskyan analysis to the body of research. "We read descriptions of the shirt as recorded in social and economic histories,...