A History of Pantsing

About 100 years ago. Before pantsing was pantsing, it was debagging, a common prank among students at the University of Oxford in the 1910s and 1920s. In England, baggy pants were known as bags, and at Oxford it was common to yank them down as a practical joke. The trousers lent themselves well to the prank, because of the ample material to grab onto. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that one of the first appearances of debagging appeared in 1914, in Sir Compton Mackenzie?s coming-of-age novel Sinister Street. When the character Lonsdale is overcome with resentment for Etonian and fellow Oxford student Appleby, he cries, ?We ought to debag him!? The novel goes on to note that while ?Appleby was thereupon debagged ? he continued to walk about trouserless ? without any loss of dignity,? and so ?the debagging had to be written down a failure.? Scenes of debagging were common to Oxonian campus novels of the period and appeared in Alfred Budd?s The Oxford Circus: A Novel of Oxford and Youth (1923) and in Philip Gibbs? 1920 Wounded Souls. The American Oxonian, the magazine of American Rhodes scholars studying at Oxford, lamented that the university had no single yell ?except, of course, the distressing cry of ?Debag him!? ?

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