pantsing

Pluralpantsings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of pulling down another person's pants, usually as a prank or a form of bullying.

   The pantsing he endured at summer camp became a story he never lived down.

   Schools increasingly treat pantsing as harassment rather than harmless horseplay.

   Similardebagging

   Note

   Names for the prank differ by region. British English calls it debagging, and kegging is another name for the same act. The difference matters because pants itself varies. In Canada, Australia, India and elsewhere it means trousers, while in the UK it means underpants, so a British listener may picture something more exposing. The noun counts both ways: a pantsing at camp, or pantsing as a practice.

2. 2
   nouncolloquialuncountable

   An improvised approach to writing in which an author works without a prepared outline.

   Like improvising a melody at the piano instead of reading from sheet music.

   Pantsing suits authors who find outlines stifling and prefer to discover the story as they write.

   After years of careful planning, she switched to pantsing for her latest thriller.

   Oppositeplotting

   Note

   Novelists use this word in craft talk, and it stays informal, so it is best kept out of a formal essay on composition. The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing (2017) presents it as a fallback beside planning, and its advice captures the attitude: don't worry how the story will hang together, just start writing. Its natural opposite is outlining. Context keeps it apart from the schoolyard prank, which has exactly the same spelling.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle of pants.

   Someone caught a kid pantsing a classmate on the playground.

   They kept pantsing each other throughout the camping trip.

   Note

   A verb built straight from the garment: to pants someone is to pull their pants down. The s therefore stays put, and the form has nothing to do with panting, which comes from pant. The verb is transitive and wants a person as its object (pantsing a classmate). As a gerund it overlaps almost completely with the noun for the prank; a following object is what marks the verb.

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