shirt-sleeve

See also: shirt sleeve and shirtsleeve

English edit

The adjective sense is derived from the practice of taking one’s jacket off and relaxing in shirt sleeves.

shirt-sleeve (not comparable)

Having an informal, relaxed appearance or approach, particularly in business.
He had a shirt-sleeve style of management.

shirt-sleeve (plural shirt-sleeves)

Alternative form of shirt sleeve
- 1872, William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond:
  Not one of those rustic wassals of the Ouse of Widdlers, but ad his air curled and his shirt-sleaves tied up with pink ribbing as he led to the macy dance some appy country gal, with a black velvit boddice and a redd or yaller petticoat, a hormylu cross on her neck, and a silver harrow in her air!
- 1934, F[rancis] Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night: A Romance, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC; republished as chapter VIII, in Malcolm Cowley, editor, Tender is the Night: A Romance [...] With the Author’s Final Revisions, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, →OCLC, book III (Casualties: 1925), page 153:
  But Dick's necessity of behaving as he did was a projection of some submerged reality: he was compelled to walk there, or stand there, his shirt-sleeve fitting his wrist and his coat sleeve encasing his shirt-sleeve like a sleeve valve, his collar moulded plastically to his neck, his red hair cut exactly, his hand holding his small briefcase like a dandy—just as another man once found it necessary to stand in front of a church in Ferrara, in sackcloth and ashes.