"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 30/10/17 (Gotham and knickers)

I'm going to tell a story that draws an unlikely link between Gotham City, of the Batman movies, and ladies' underwear. It goes bach, believe it or not, to a sleepy little village in Nottinghamshire, which got by the name of Gotham. And in the medieval period, the people of Gotham, they got a bit of reputation for being very, very foolish. But it may all have been a slightly subtle ruse, because at the time, King John - who was a villain in all the Robin Hood stories - wanted to built a public highway through the village of Gotham, and thix didn't go down very well with the villagers. So they may have wanted to feign madness, because at this time madness  thought to be highly contagious.   So, clearly, if they were thought to be mad, then King John would not want to go anywhere near them. And the ruse worked, it didn't go through and it remained a slightly sleepy village. If you go forward a few centuries from that time, and you'll find somebody called Washington Irving. And Washington Irving was living in New York, and he worked on a satirical magazine, which was called Salmagundi. And in one of the issues, he reffered to New York as Gotham, and he spelt it in the same was as Gotham. And he knew - he knew his history clearly - because he was inplying that, actually, anyone who wanted to live in New York mast be just slightly foolish and a little bit mad. It was picked up, it seems, in the 1930s by the creators of Batman, who remembered the satirical magaxine ans thought it was the perfect name for New York City. Whether or not they knew the foolish connotation or not, who knows? Anyway to finish off with the ladies' underwear, Washington Irving was also, through his character Dietrich Knickerbocker, the one who gave us the knickerbockers. Because the characters, the Dutch settlers in New York, wore these particular trousers. Knickerbocker, many, many centuries later, was then shortened to knickers. So, Gotham in Batman has, yes, some very tenuous link with a pair of ladies' knickers. But I like the story.