A garment worn on the upper body. It is made of cloth, has a collar, sleeves, and buttons down the front, unless it doesn't. For example, a T-shirt is also a shirt but there is no collar, no buttons, and the sleeves are only stubs. How can this be?
Also, a shirt is a cloth garment for the upper body, originally an undergarment worn exclusively by men, now almost any upper-body garment other than outerwear. OK fine.
And torso camouflage, since most of us look funny without clothes, so shirts let us look less like jokes. Some of us.
But then "shirt", as we know it now, is a garment that used to go by the name of "scyrte", but that was a long time ago, and later they changed the name to "skirt", but we don't go with that one anymore either.
Manly men wear these garments on their upper bodies and now call them shirts and are proud of them, and women wear the skirts, and shirts too, by the way, and not just manly women either. So.
But men don't wear skirts except for someone like Dean Peterson, a non-lady mail carrier in Washington State who liked the feeling of his Male Unbifurcated Garment (MUG), what some like to disguise under the term "kilt", as if, right?. Anyway, Peterson owns 15 of them things, or did at last count, which was a while ago. "Please open your hearts — and inseams — for an option in mail carrier comfort!", he said at a National Association of Letter Carriers convention around 2008. Well no.
His enthusiasm got voted down, enthusiastically, but the "berserker" (bear shirt) option is still available if you feel like you want to go there. Really. "Berserk" = "bear shirt", from the olden days when men were men and bears were bears and men who wore bear shirts were seriously nuts. "In battle, the berserkers were subject to fits of frenzy. They would howl like wild beasts, foam at the mouth, and gnaw the rims of their shields." According to Wikipedia, which knows such things.
How does my backpack go with this bear shirt, hon? 'Nuff hair on it? Wuff-wuff? Want to get a little berserk this evening? Maybe? Work up a sweat or something?
Even if you wear your ursine fuzz as a kilt, no one is likely to mess with you, especially if you go bare on top, and gnaw on stuff. And howl. And so on, though some like that sort of thing, we hear. Only a rumor for now.
So "shirt" probably covers more ground than you thought then, right? Most things do.
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Me? Not howling that much any more. Not really. Not enough to notice.