Saturday’s Irish Times featured an entertaining review by Booker-shortlisted author John Banville of Neil Steinberg’s Hatless Jack: the President, the Fedora and the Death of the Hat.This exhaustive compendium of headgear-related facts attempts to correct the myth, of which I was blissfully unaware until yesterday, that Kennedy’s aversion to hats doomed the industry. Steinberg points out, however, that “the peak year for the manufacture of men’s hats in the United States was 1903, and by the middle 1920s hatlessness was a major problem for the industry…”An anecdote from the book that struck me dates from much further back–and comes from an account from Samuel Pepys’s diary of a dinner he had in the 1660s with a member of the nobility where they discussed the Duke of York’s recent hasty marriage to his pregnant mistress:'”My Lord told me,” Pepys recorded, “that among his father’s many old sayings that he had writ in a book of his, this is one: “That he that doth get a wench with child and marries her afterwards is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap upon his head.””‘By the way, near the end of the review, Banville writes “As Steinberg goes on laconically to observe, “The risk of being beaten by a mob, however remote, should not be underestimated as a force in fashion.”Now to correct the word usage of a writer such as Banville might seem like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, but a sentence that features a subclause and litotes is hardly laconic. Perhaps it’s becoming one of those words, like “literally”, for which the popular meaning is now the exact opposite of its dictionary one.