I've been thinking about this a lot as my family goes swimming at a friend's pool every week. I wear a swimmodest swimsuit, which I think is pretty modest, although I'd like a leetle bit higher of a neckline, and longer legs under the skirt. Anyways, I'm one of those people who doesn't wear ANYTHIING above my knees anywhere else. So I was wondering, particularly of the guys out there, is it just me, or do the standards really fluxuate a little bit depending on where one is?

Thanks,

Hannah

The standards don't so much change as proliferate. You know that English language spelling has so many exceptions that it isn't funny? Those don't usually represent changing rules, they represent different rule sets: is this word borrowed from German or from French, or is it taken directly from Latin? The game of being good at it is figuring out which rule is in play.

Similarly, different situations have different rules because those rules make sense for that specific situation–or did, when it was a budding idea in someone's head. The problem tends to come when occasional situations are mixed in with everyday life: as MIn observed, the problem with swimsuits is that they're worn on dry land.

I'm sure French spelling makes sense within French. Mix it occasionally (but not frequently enough for it to be expected) into English, and you get merry hell.

In case I haven't carried the metaphor as far as I could yet, there are also those who delight in missapplying the rules, as witness lolcat–I can has cheeze?–and track students who wear their uniforms all day, or girls who wear a bra to school and call it a shirt (this doesn't bother me on a whitewater guide, but it does in the street for some reason).