Why “Might Stain Your Shirt?” How The Website Got Its Name.
Captain Slow made a wine show,
which he called a program,
which ran for one season,
which he called a series.
I’ll come back and fix that distracting first line someday. Until then, take any criticism of my versification with a grain of salt. Whatever imagined deficiencies anyone is likely to harp on stem from the already acknowledged erroneous extra syllable in the opening. As the metric break is already pointed out by the author, my critics resort to pettiness probably spurred by jealousy. I may leave it flawed. No sense having people mistake it for a lost Yeats.
Captain Slow is the nickname of James May, one of the trio of presenters for the long running BBC show Top Gear, later retooled as the Amazon offering, Grand Tour. May ran a series of other series, stuff he did on his own or with someone other than his Top Gear co-hosts. Oz and James’s Big Wine Adventure is one of those, and well worth your time. May and wine enthusiant Oz Clarke, “wine ponce” according to May, travel first through France and then through California, in search of a reasonably priced bottle May can pick up down at the corner shop. Lighthearted documentary appropriate high jinx ensue.
At some point in the dozen or so episodes, May tries a wine made by a friend of Oz’s and dislikes it. There are exasperated cut away asides ending in Oz telling May to say something, anything, nice about the wine when the friend comes back because he doesn’t want to offend. So, to the friend May says of the wine, which is white, “Well... It might not stain your shirt.”
I don’t know why that struck me as so funny. It is mildly funny, but it got me more than it should have. It’s a damning thing to say about anything that all that can be noted is that is of what it is, that it’s so devoid of distinguishing character, that it exists as a matter of type and nothing more. I’m harping way too much on this, but forgettable is an awful judgment to damn anything with. It got in my head that anything of value would leave a mark.
After watching the show, I started dismissing things I didn’t care about with “Might not stain your shirt.” I only said it to my wife; it would have been gibberish to anyone else. Eventually it divorced from May and Oz. I’d use the opposite to mean good things. It didn’t take an expansive imagination to say of a well made tomato sauce, “That’ll stain your shirt,” or when looking at a menu, saying, “I want something that will stain my shirt.” It got odd. A shortstop pulled off a miracle double play and unbidden it erupted from me, “Damn! That’ll stain your shirt.”
Not staining your shirt was a sarcastic derision on par with saying something has no character. At some point, staining a shirt became a compliment as well meaning the something had substance. Soon enough, it picked up a meaning synonymous with “Well done,” “Nice,” and “Hell yeah.” It stopped making sense anymore in relation to May’s line. I killed that syntax long ago. But that’s how it came about.
This site is called “Might Stain Your Shirt” because this is where I play around. Hopefully, what I do is of interest. Hopefully, there’s substance.
Now, a word of caution. I just went through the entire two seasons of Oz and James’s Big Wine Adventure, fast forwarding and stopping at every wine tasting scene to quote the “might not stain your shirt” scene exactly. I’ll be damned if I can find it. I even ran through the follow up series Oz and James Drink to Britain. My wife remembers May’s delivery from our first viewing, too. I’m holding out that I just missed it this go round—skipped by it in x8 FF exuberance—but there is the possibility we’re suffering from a BBC inspired Mandela Effect. That has me scared.
What’s important for those new to the site, is the second paragraph after the Yeats-like verse above. If, on reading that, you were glad to see the word “presenter” in place of the god awful “commentator” and zipped through a well worn mental tangent about passing right over “commenter” inexplicably in favor of a clunky “commentator” and whether decrying the sports announcer’s use of the clunky makes you a “dissentator” or “objectator,” and knew right off that there’s no need for useless syllables unless differentiating yourself from Yeats, you’ll like it here, run-ons and all. I’ve got a ton of tangents.
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