redskirt
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From red + skirt. Patterned after redshirt, which derived from the tendency for male security officers, who wore red shirts, to die on episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series. Female crew members wore minidresses, but only one red-uniformed female character was killed during the series' run, in the episode "By Any Other Name."
Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]redskirt (plural redskirts)
- (fiction, fandom slang, rare) An unimportant or expendable female character, especially one introduced only to be killed in order to underscore the peril faced by important characters.
- 2007 February 10, Marc Goodman, “Re: Response to Steven Pinker's 'The Mystery of Consciousness'”, in alt.religion.kibology[1] (Usenet):
- Wasn't there that episode where the aliens turned everyone into little blocks of styrofoam, and one of the aliens turned a redskirt and a redshirt into cubes and crumbled one of them? And then Scotty got really drunk. I seem to recall that the redskirt bought it that time.
- For more quotations using this term, see Citations:redskirt.