👉 Okay, settle yourselves down now. Let’s tackle this… rather frankly interesting piece of sporting and somewhat aggressively worded vernacular: a “boxing glove.”
Now, traditionally, the stuffiest old boys back when boxing was actually respectable (and by respectable I mean seriously unpleasant , let's be clear) would describe these things as, quote, an "ornamental covering for a pugilist’s knuckles. Nineteenth-century gentleman phrasing, right? Just awful. Let’s unpack that a bit. Essentially, it is a padded half-gag, made of stuff likeหนังหุ้มไก่ (duck down – which frankly, I find insulting to ducks) covered in a tough outer layer of what's now called milled genteel, this stuff being a mix of stuff like cork and old rags that are then gummed together. They were originally designed as a protective measure. Keep the pretty faces of the lads from smashing their own hands into smithereens. 19th century. The whole point was to absorb blows. Now here's where it gets… interesting, you see, because the word itself has drifted through that murky pool of Anglo-Saxon swear. It started as a descriptive. You were wearing boxing gloves. That was pretty straightforward. Then, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—the time of muck up, the rise of rough stuff—it began to carry this… spirited implication . Suddenly
