The Podcast Kid

 In the matter of podcasts...

<etymological-note>
(a porte-manteau word that preserves in the aspic of common usage, two words neither of which is relevant and the latter of which never was: iPod and boadcast – a recent guest on Armando Iannucci's Strong Message Here {Stuart Lee?} pointed out the inappropriatemess of 'broadcast' [which podcasts aren't], though the historic nature of the iPod had been bothering me for years. Well, not exactly bothering me – I just noticed it and added it  to my mental list of words like 'hang up' or 'tinder-box' or 'fast-forward' or 'the final reel' – expressions that preserve an obsolete technology in current vocabulary.

<tangent>
I was once the proud owner of an iPaq (when PDAs – personal digital assistants – were all the rage). This was  in the '90s, before Apple had bagsied words with an initial i- and Compaq came late to the PDA market. I wonder how Apple and Compaq came to a peaceful settlement; presumably a Cease and Desist order was issued,
</tangent>

</etymological-note>

... I am a relative newcomer, in that  I have stuck mainly to ones that spun off from BBC radio programmes ...

<parenthesis>

on which subject I was initially sceptical when some time ago (at the beginning of the retirement shenanigans) someone on the BBC described Melvyn Bragg as {≅} 'a pioneer of podcasts at the BBC'. 

But I see now that he was, provided that the last three words are borne in mind (which this 'AI Overview doesn't do:)

He realized that he could extend a 44 minute program by overflowing into the new medium. Pretty good for 1998, but not really Davy Crockett-like.

</parenthesis>

There are thousands (millions? Anyway, oodles) of non-BBC podcasts. As I wrote here when I first dipped a tentative toe  in the misinformation-infested waters ...

<tangent>
I've been  listening recently to A Carnival of the Animals – a series of  very short (3/4 minutes each) pieces on endangered animals, by Katherine Rundell. She memorably just said words to the effect of 'There's no such thing as "shark-infested waters", just as there's no such thing as "child-infested schools". They belong there.'. [Just saying.]

<etymological-note>
I wonder if Rundell (or her producer) had in mind the theory (that Etymonline dismisses as 'folk etymology) that carnevale (Italian, 'Shrove Tuesday', literally 'farewell to flesh') has something to do with leave-taking. As the series is about the depradations done to the planet during the anthropocene...

<meta-tangent>
{the period when the Earth's systems have been changed by homo sapiens (sapiens? More like homo gastator ['wasteful/spendthrift'], if you ask me, if not homo <shooting-himself-in-the-foot> (my latin's not up to that – auto-pedal-something I suppose). Perhaps homo exmordens-manum-nutrientem ['biting-off-the-hand-that-feeds-him']}
</meta-tangent>

...it seems to me that this farewell thing is a possible explanation, although as the theme music is an extract from the 'Aquarium' movement of the Saint-Saens work, and the series is about animals,  perhaps I'm over-thinking it. Over-thinkimg? Moi?

.... 

</etymological-note>

    </tangent>

...of the podosphere:

<prescript date="Aug. 2021">
One can get sucked in to a black hole of true crime and unsolved mysteries; there is a lot of dross out there. And there are vain attempts at sticking to a format that must have seemed worth sticking to at some stage: a prime example is British Scandal (not BBC so interlarded with toe-curling advertisements): the  creators seem to think that scandal means "any-old fairly noteworthy thing that caused a bit of a stir once and involved skulduggery of some kind".
</prescript>

There is a way to avoid these toe-curling ads (made worse by being voiced [sometimes] by the hosts themselves), but it nvolves paying to be a privileged member and getting ad-less podcasts (and other perks). But MrsK and I have just changed power supplier, and as it happens our new supplier is giving away The Rest Is Politics Plus membership. But to get it, you have to click on a TRIP+ link, which we didn't do.

I threw myself on their mercy, and after an initial 'Sorry, too late' they relented. So, for the next year I'll get loads of perks (that I'll never use),  but at least I don't have to listen to those HP ads (which, as I said here) underline the pension injustice that I'm not obsessing about, honest.

b

Update: 2025.10.27.20:20 – Added link in last sentence, and typo fixes.

Unconsidered trifles

I've been thinking about something known in a former (Nets&Comms) life as 'the problem of propagation delay'  (the reason for queues at a 4-way temporary traffic light when there's one carriageway out of action, although nobody seems to be going anywhere or doing anything). The reason for this thought process is that for the last 3 or 4 weeks I've been effectively locked out of my O2 account for two reasons: 

• my email is an alias (something that looks like a proper me@cantab.net address, but is really just an instruction to cantab.net to forward any mail received to my actual address). This means that whatever my current address is I just have to tell cantab.net and I don't have to waste everyone's time telling everyone in my address book that I've changed.
• O2 have got some deal going with Virgin, which farms out their password management to something called Virgin Media O2 (VMO2). I don't  know why they did this. I imagine Outsourcing was mentioned by a bean counter somewhere.

Anyway, what it means is that when I try to log in, four nodes (O2, Virgin, cantab.net, and my actual address) are involved – allowing for delays at every stage. So I enter my @cantab address and O2, in the politest possible terms, says 'Not my problem' (or, to be precise, VMO2 sign-in – preceded after a  longish pause, by some false bonhomie along the lines of 

Hang on a moment while we get our ducks in a row

).

I enter my password and VMO2 promises to send me a link by email. They send it, in their own good time, to cantab.net, who look up where I am and forward it to me. I click on the link and get this:

This reminds me of a text  that, since it was written in 1975 (when I had never set eyes on a computer) has been required reading for any first-year student of Software Engineering :

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

<gender-neutral-version>

The Perennially-Putative Person-Period?

<rant>

And while we're on the subject, that's my least-favoured  bit of dead wood: 'period of time'. What else could a period be of? A period of... aubergine? But I keep hearing it. To quote Tom Wossname (...got it: Thomas Paine), 'Lay then the ax to the root'. Period. [Full stop]
</rant>

 </gender-neutral-version>

There are many reasons for software development to take longer than is planned. Many of those involve  the aforementioned 'man-month'...

<prescript>
I've explained before how I feel about uses and abuses of the word 'mythical'.

If they want to say it's untrue (a usage of 'myth' that I loathe [sic, and another thing I loathe is being thought to have got the spelling wrong when I use 'loth' to mean 'unwilling'] with the heat of a million Suns, as my little sister knows to her cost*), they're undermining their own argument... [HD '25: which is irrelevant here, except that it underlines how the 1975 book's title is OK – I just think twice before I say 'mythical'.]

*In the mid '70s I was studying the idea of myth in the work of Borges, and with the self-assurance of a 23-year-old I thought myself the sole custodian of the word 'myth'. Sorry, old bean. 

</prescript> 

...; because if you increase the number of people working on a software development task by n, you increase the output by less than n, as you increase the communications overhead. To take an implausibly trivial example. If you have Tom Dick and Harry (T, D and H), lines of communication are TD, DT, TH, HT, DH and HD (3!). If you double the team, then lines of communication more than double. 

<autobographical-note>

Software development teams such as the ones I worked with often had several dozen members, with umpteen interlocking dependencies and a huge communications overhead (although repeated rounds of redundancies reduced  that – while, naturally, increasing the number and size of the cracks for stuff to fall through.

</autobographical-note>

Harmless Drudgery Sitrep

Ten years ago I wrote this:

<prescript>
...At the end of last year I referred to a growing following, then reaching an average of 35 daily visits. Well 35 schmirty-five. This has been a record month (an average of over 55 visits per day).
</prescript>

Well that 'record month' has just been knocked into a cocked hat.

<etymological-break>
Presumably this is a reference to office-carpet-golf, in which  a hat, tipped-up (or cocked) is used as a target. (This is not the gospel truth, it just seems quite thing-ish to me.)
<etymological-break>

In September 2025 the web site has had well over a thousand visits a day (1014.43 to be precise), the highest monthly total in the life of the blog. And the previous record (21357 – 712 per day) was only last June. Here's the picture for the past twelve months:

Figures courtesy of Google Blogger, though the graphic is 'mine'
(in the sense that I made it, although the  IP no doubt
belongs to some tech-bro)

And finally

While looking into the Member Benefits of the Union Society (of which I became a life member in 1971)  I was... (uplifted?)...to see this:

Tha'sall for now. Just time (before tonight's rehearsal) for some much-needed note-bashing for this:

It will be anazing once we learn it. Don't miss it.

b

'The good is oft' [but not always] 'interréd with their bones"

 In the early days of this blog, I wrote this:

<prescript date="2013">

This morning in a trail for an Eartha Kitt program next weekend I heard this:

C'est si bon,
De partir n'importe où,
Bras dessus bras dessous,
En chantant des chansons

 And at the words bras dessus bras dessous a synapse clicked [There she was just a-walkin' down the street singing Doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo. Snapping her synapses...?]. It was not the tedious 'Aha, bras dessus bras dessous MEANS "arm-in-arm"' (the sort of knee-jerk 'equivalence' that often condemns learners to endless tongue-tied ratiocination - which I've summed up in this image:

I've probably uploaded this to TESconnect, but here it is anyway. )

</prescript>

In a revised version of this post I later wrote

<prescript date="2020">

In a trail for an Eartha Kitt program  I heard once there was a song that I had never heard in the original (although C'est si bon ...

<parenthesis>
(one of those "translations" that give up the effort of actually translating, and just throw in the odd snatch of the original – Volare is another example)
</parenthesis>

...is a commonplace on the lounge circuit in an English version):

And the phrase bras dessus bras dessous took me back to my French classroom in the early '60s (possibly '63-'64, otherwise '65-'66...

<autobiographical-note>
Not in the intervening year, when we were consigned to the attention of an assistant, who –  much to our annoyance at the time – insisted that we learn and use the symbols of the IPA.  I was later to realize that – unless total immersion in the environment of the target language was possible  – IPA symbols were an almost essential ...

<parenthesis>
(and that "almost" is a craven sop to the sometimes vocal language teachers who are happy to pander to the needs of  students who can't use a decent [that is, mono-lingual] dictionary)
</parenthesis> 

...tool for learning a language.
</autobiographical-note>

...). The particular memory was of Cedric Baring-Gould's mime of walking arm in arm. My reaction was not a simplistic "Aha – bras dessus bras dessous is "the equivalent..."  (whatever that means in the context)  "....of the English" ...

<parenthesis>
(the assistant had introduced us to the less formal la main dans la main [in Françoise Hardy's "Tous les garçons et les filles de mon âge].. or "was to introduce" – all these parentheses are a bit too involved even for me...
</parenthesis>

 ...."arm-in-arm".
The question O que é? triggers the name of the object, [HD 2025 – in that Portuguese-teaching diagram] without recourse to the arduous and time-consuming and unnatural and error-prone left-hand route.

As I wrote in that earlier post:

My memory was of the mime performed by my French master 50-odd years ago. I've mentioned Cedric before, here. I can imagine his shade smiling down with a look of smug satisfaction (like the one he used to show the difference between 'No vacancies' and 'Complet' [HD 2020: arms  folded for the latter, hands upraised for the former]). 

I'll never forget BG's figure hunched over the enormous reel-to-reel Grundig that he always carried from class to class. (The assistant had one of the new cassette players, but BG swore by his magnétophone).

</prescript>

In a more recent reference to Monsieur I added

<autobiographical-note>

He – Cedric Baring-Gould...

<meta-autobiographical-note>
[the reason, incidentally, for my choice of  college, as a former pupil of his had been the first in my school to go to Cambridge]
</meta-autobiographical-note>

... – ... used a huge Grundig reel-to-reel magnétophone. He schlepped this multi-kilo apparatus, day in day out, from classroom to classroom, realizing  – unusually for the time – the importance, in modern language teaching, of giving learners the actual sounds of native speakers. Today's MFL (modern foreign language) teachers have recourse to YouTube for examples from real-life foreign speakers, thus avoiding curvature of the spine; not so for poor old Cedric.)

</autobiographical-note>

L'envoi 

 At this time of year, teachers of all kinds may need the fillip of these posts: your pupils will remember some of their teachers for the rest of their lives, the good as much as the bad. If you're good, what you do (probably more than what you say) will let your pupils take away from your lessons much more than you think.

 

A Nobel Wheeze

In a recent The Rest Is Politics Alastair Campbell made a suggesion that I suspect wasn't entirely serious. It seems to me though that it deserves serious consideration.

<RS-style-interruption> 

Habitués of The Rest Is Politics will be familiar with the frequent interruptions made by Rory Stewart when  Alastair Campbell jumps in in medias res (as Rory might put it).

<tangent> 

Stewart doesn't always manage to keep Campbell in check. A recent example of a misinterpretation that he didn't forestall involved a bit of proof-reading jargon. In a recent podcast Alastair Campbell seemed to be talking about someone called 'Elsie Conservative'. He was halfway through the next sentence  before I realized that he had said '(l.c.) conservative'. Until my short spell working at OUP in the early 1980s I hadn't met the abbreviation 'l.c.' (=lower case), and I've never before heard 'small-c conservative' rendered in this way.

</tangent>

This is what Wikipedia says about USAID: 

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was created to provide foreign aid, disaster relief, and economic development.^[4] Established in 1961 during the Cold War by President John F. Kennedy, USAID was designed to counter the Soviet Union through the use of soft power across the world. In 1998, USAID was reorganized by Congress as an independent agency.

With average annual disbursements of about $23 billion from 2001 to 2024, USAID had missions in over 100 countries, in areas as diverse as education, global health, environmental protection, and democratic governance. An estimated 91.8 million deaths, including 30.4 million among children younger than five years old, were likely prevented by USAID funding between 2001 and 2021.... 

On January 24, 2025 President Donald Trump ordered a near-total freeze on all foreign aid.  In February, the administration placed most employees on administrative leave. The absence of authorization from Congress led to lawsuits against the Trump administration.Also in February, the administration made several allegations of wasteful spending and fraud, allegations which were generally reported [HD: sic; many observers would prefer 'found'] to be false.

Several days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for humanitarian aid. However, a key issue developed over whether the waivers for lifesaving aid were actually translating into aid flowing. Despite the waiver, there was still much confusion about what agencies should do. More than 1,000 USAID employees and contractors were fired or furloughed following the near-total freeze on U.S. global assistance that the second Trump  administration implemented.

On January 27, 2025, the agency's official government website was shut down. 

<HD-update> 
Generally I've removed footnote references from that Wikipedia entry, as they wouldn't work  without a lot of recoding. But one footnote points to this Impact Metrics Dashboard (and at time of blogpost, the most recent upate was on 26 June). If, in a Wikipedia-esque sort of way, you think 'NEEDS CITATION', you know where to look.

<inline-ps>
Another footnote cites this report from the National Library of Medicime. whose title says it all:  Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis

</inline-ps> 

</HD-update>

</RS-style-interruption> 

 Alastair Campbell's idea is in two steps:

1. Nominate USAID for the Peace Prize.
2. Invite Trump to receive it on their  behalf, given that they have been disbanded.
   
   
   

I'm afraid that 2 is unlikely to happen, for  diplomatic reasons. Besides, Trump wouldn't accept. But I think the first step is worth considering. The criteria for those qualified to make nominations, according to  the Peace Prize criteria for nominators  include:

• Members of national assemblies and national governments (cabinet members/ministers) of sovereign states as well as current heads of state...

and

University professors, professors emeriti and associate professors of history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology, and religion; university rectors and university directors (or their equivalents)... 

So most citizens of the free world  could ask a member of a national assembly to do it, and any suitably qualified academic could do it. I'm sure there must be dozens of Harvard staff who would happily join in.

It's not uncommon for  the Peace Prize to be awarded to an institution. The only drawback I can see is that the Nobel Committee might invoke the No Posthumous Prizes rule, which I thought had been invented off the cuff by a misogynist to justify the exclusion of Rosalind Franklin from Crick and Watson's prize. And as the earliest date for the award would be 2026 USAID will by then be well and truly defunct.

That's enough for today.

b

Update: 2025.08.26.20:15 – Added <inline-ps />

What do you do with a foot?

I first heard the expression 'step foot' 20 or 30 years ago, when I dismissed it as a one-off mistake; or maybe, as I was working at the time in a US-based company, I imagined it was a feature of American English (AE). But I've been hearing it more and more, and have finally looked at a Google Ngram that compares the two.

The expression 'step foot' made a negligible impression until the early 1990s

<autobiographical-note>
I'm reading at the moment a novel set in the time of Henry (Tom Jones etc.)
Fielding:  

The 'guilty' novel

The 'guilty' novel

It would be ridiculous to expect a modern novelist to write all the dialogue in a historical novel cast in the vernacular of the day; without linguistic anachronisms it would simply be unintelligible. But I don't think I have ever seen this phrase in print, and I had only just seen this Google Ngram (or maybe, now I think of it, the fact of my interest in the expression made me notice somethng I'd been seeing for years but not paying attention to).

Anyway, for whatever reason, I did notice when an eighteenth-century character used a late-twentieth century speech form.
</autobiographical-note>

But that Google Ngram lumps together by default all English appearances of the queried text, from Google Books in general. It is possible though to narrow it down to AE or BE.

<tangent>
...but not Australian English or South African English, or....Besides, what does 'AE' mean? Does it include Canadian English, or ia 'A' just an abbreviation for 'USA'? And besides,  how can a Google Books title refer to any particular geography? Does 'BE' include Indian English and all those other Englishes that publsher's rights contracts refer to as relating to the 'traditional British Commonwealth' (or did when I last had to deal with such things, in the early 1980s)?

So many questions, so little time...
<tangent>

And AE, as usual, takes the lead in the evolition of English:

The 'step foot' line begins to heave itself up off the x-axis as early as the 1980s. By contrast, in BE that line shows no significant sign of life until the mid-late noughties, when in AE it had been growing increasingly strong for 30-odd years. And whereas in AE 'set foot' outnumbers 'step foot' about 10:1 in BE the number is more like 15:1; give it a few years though. 

(I'll never use the arriviste 'step foot', but my grandchildren may. Speaking of which, as I'll be seeing them all tomorrow, there are things I should be getting ready....)

b

 

Infamy at Deef Castle

 MrsK and I began (and decided not to continue with  the other seven parts of ...) The Count of Monte Cristo (the new one on U & Drama) the other night. The Radio Times had praised it for its faithfulness to Dumas' original, but we should have known that 'faithfulness to the original' can (but needn't...

<exception>
(as is demonstrated by the BBC's 1964 version starring Alan Badel...

<autobiographical-note>
{which I remember watching [but not following or sticking  with] as a recently-turned 13-year-old; its mournful theme tune [which in my mind's ear I hear  as featuring a horn solo, though at that age I wouldn't have recognized the instrument, and it may be a figment of my imagination] didn't promise the sort of derring-do that might have held my attention at the time] and the names were all pronounced in a funny way [Badel pronounced his sweetheart à la française – stress on the last syllable – /mɛrse'dɛz/ : this clashed with my own understanding, honed as it was by my recent exposure to I Spy On the Road – I knew how to pronounce Mercedes (odd name for a woman though, I thought at the time)].

</autobiographical-note>

The IMDb page for the 1964 Count of Monte Cristo has many reviews (20 at time of going to press), all of which rate it very highly (and several of them mention faithfulness to the text – although at 12 x 25 mins it's shorter than the new one.)
</exception>

...) can lead to an adaptation that to quote the review in last Sarurday's Times ...

<parenthesis>
(that's The Times, known in some parts of thr world as 'the London Times', but more memorably [at the time of the move from Fleet Street] as 'The Wapping Liar')
</parenthesis>

...is 'clunky'. The characters  are two-dimensional, the plot is advanced not by the action but by the stilted dialogue, and to make suspension of disbelief even  less possible the foreign names are treated to the most ridiculous of San Ferry Ann pronunciations. The Château d'If is a lot less intimidating as the ' Castle d'If'; we should be  grateful, I suppose, that it's not 'Deef Castle'. One of its inmates is promised to be Jeremy Irons, which might make it more watchable; but he didn't appear in episode one so we'll have to give him a miss.

l'Envoi

I usually enjoy The Rest Is Politics (both Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart's original and the US spinoff with Katty Kay and  Anthony ('the Mooch') Scaramucci (more robust than the Beeb's Americast), but recently they've been spoiled for me by the ads for HP, which offer a special TRIP discount. I don't want the discount; as an ex-employee I already get one. Rather than giving out discounts I'd prefer them to treat their older pensioners with a modicum of decency.

<administrative-background general- interest="nugatory">
By a quirk of UK pensions law, Defined Benefit pensions (the good sort, which most people don't get any more), if earned before 1997, are treated differently than pensions earned more recently. While recent pensions are legally required to be kept at a more-or-less steady value by annual increments, pensions earned before 1997 attract  'discretionary' increases (i.e. in practice, courtesy of HP, in the UK [though not in the USA, or anywhere  else for that matter]  more often than not, nothing). As an example, the first ⅔  of my service (1984-1997), earns less (or barely more – life's too short to do the sums – what do you take me for, obsessional?) than the final ⅓ (1998-2004) , because the more recently earned pension has kept pace with inflation while the earlier period's earnings have increased, over more than 20 years, by a single figure percentage.

This is immoral, and I would think barely legal, as it constitutes discrimination on grounds of age. I am far from being on my uppers, but I'm much less well-off than HP pensioners in other parts of the world. So the HP  ads  rankle. Bitter? Moi?                                                               

 <tangent>
If you're really interested in this pre '97 stuff, you could start with this Lexology page

<inline-PS>
For a graphic explanation of this injustice, with particular reference to HP, see here.
</inline-PS

</tangent> 

</administrative-background>

I'm missing the cricket again, so finita la commedia.

b

Update: 2025.08.16.17.40 – Added <inline-PS />

 

 

Of vests and waistcoats rediviva

<inline-pps>
A lot of this post disappeared in a puff of phosphorescence 

<mea-culpa>
'Pilot error'  as engineers used to say when I'd done something silly. Over-enthusistic deletion (and hasty reading of deletion warnings). 
</mea-culpa>

So only the PS survived, until today (31 July 2025).                                               </inline-pps> 

In a recent episode  of The Week in  Westminster a guest referred to Trump playing his cards 'close to his chest', which I felt would have been more appropriate as 'close to his vest'.

<autobiographical-note>
Ever since, in my early teens, I came across a book entitled (sic for Heaven's sake...

<rant frequency="You may have heard this before">
I know acadenics are forced, on pain of non-publication, to use 'titled' when referring to books, because of the ubiquity of American style guides, but the requirements of American English (AmE) (with its cultural background of a society without a peerage) has the luxury of one word assigned to each of two meanings: titled of a book, entitled of a person. British English, however, has three meanings:

• Entitled (in the preppy AmE sense) of a person
• Entitled (in the sense of bearing a title) of a book
• Titled (in the sense of being a member of the peerage) of a person

'Two's into three: I cannot do it' as we used to say in the arithmetic class. So, in BrE we don't have that luxury and simply have to use the two words in three senses.
</rant> 

...). A Vest-Pocket Ready Reckoner, a relic of my mother's (whom saints preserve and they better had) work at Technicolor. 'But vests don't have pockets,' I complained. 'They do in America,' she said; 'over there it means waistcoat.'

So, until my recent reference to corpuses...

<here-be-irregular-plurals>
(and although the  English Corpora site wants me to call them 'corpora' I'm sticking with Fowler – who prefers -s plurals in most cases [a rule that I have added to with this codicil: 'especially when the plural is irregular']).
</here-be-irregular-plurals>

...I believed that the AmE version of 'waistcoat' was always 'vest' 
</autobiographical-note>

Then, in the same week as that The Week in Westminster programme, a prospector in McLevy in the New World used the word 'waistcoat' – leading me to these corpus searches:

As near as makes no odds, the 'chest' and 'vest' versions are about equally common in AmE.

Whereas in BrE there is a clear preference for 'chest':

 

And I suspect these two 'vests' may have an American context.

I turned finally to the Google Ngram Viewer, which makes it (suspiciously? Discuss) easy to compare AmE and BrE usage, and got these results (looking just at the words vest and waistcoat). 'Vest' has always been the more common,  but usually only by a factor of about 5.

Meanwhile in BrE the two are less extremely distributed, but usually only by a factor of about 2 (which, given  that in BrE the words always refer to distinct garments, I find interesting.

<autobiog>
I certainly have experience of a lot more vests than waistcoats, though admittedly waistcoats tend to be more comment-worthy than vests.
</autobiog>

Enough, 

b

Update:2025.06.03.17:50 – Added PS

PS

Typical! There was I talking about AmE usage, and the more I looked into it the wronger I got. COHA shows that 'vest' can be used to mean waistcost in AmE and often does, but 'waistcoat' certainly exists. Until WWII it was relatively common, but since then its appearance has been fairly wan:

Graph showing AE usage of waistcoat

approximately aligned  – on my screen (but YMMV)–

with corpus data

Meanwhile, 'vest' is more than twice  as common:

                          

So 'vest' has been growing in popularity, with some of the increase attributable to its use as a synonym for 'waistcoat'.