Of vests and waistcoats

A guest on this week's Westminster Hour described Donald 'There goes my Nobel' Trump as holding his cards 'close to his chest', making me wonder at the time whether 'close to his vest' wouldn't have been more appropriate; I  thought at the time that 'close to his vest' was the American English variant.

<autobiographical-note>
This belief was born in my early teens, when I saw an American book called The Vest Pocket Ready Reckoner. 'But vests don't have pockets', I thought, until my mother (whom saints preserve, and they better had) explained that 'vest' was AE for waistcoat. And  I thought she must be  a reliable source on AE usage, having met my father when she was working at Technicolor, and so having had several US colleagues.

</autobiographical-note>

But the facts of AE usage are a little more nuanced than that. A look in the COCA corpus shows that close to * chest is only very slightly less common than close to * vest.

Meanwhile, in BNC the picture is much clearer: the chest version vastly outnumbers the vest version, and I suspect those two vests have American contexts.

These corpuses (which invite me to call them corpora, though I am with Fowler in preferring English plural forms, a rule that I enforce  all the more when the Latin plural is irregular) are very different in size and currency ...

<US-scholarship-warning>

I believe COCA is not only much bigger but – for the time being, at least, before the DOGE rot has fully set in – more recently and regularly kept up to date

</US-scholarship-warning>

... but they do give an indication of the two usages.

AE usage of the two words (which in this case would
have referred to the same garment).

But this isn't the end of the corrections to my mistaken views about AE usage with regard to 'vest' and 'waistcoat'. Later in the week I heard the first episode in the new McLevy series; and an American prospector used the word wistcoat...

 <autobiographical-note>
 (with the /weskɪt/ pronunciation   that my   grandfather would have  insisted on)
<autobiographical-note>

                                                                                                                

In BE the curves representing the two words are much closer together. And as they refer to different garments, I'm surprised that 'vest' is less than twice as common. I don't think I'm alone in having had dozens more vests than waistcoats (although I suppose waistcoats are more likely to attract comment).

But there are possibly more important considerations.

That's all she wrot6e.

b