In this week’s upcoming Will’s Word, we’ll be tastefully examining the history of “bikini.” Along the way, we’ll be spending a moment — a brief, horrible, regrettably immodest moment — looking at the “mankini,” a sling bikini for men, as well as the male bikini bottom.

To get it over with, as it were, let's "examine" this matter of male swimwear briefly. The “mankini” is the more hideous of the two, in my humble philological opinion, as a shuddered thought or two will soon reveal.

The comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, in his 2006 mockumentary, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, “popularized” it, and, among others, Jim Carrey and John Mayer have, ah, donned them. If you really, really want to see them for yourself, you can go here; Carrey’s mankini, it must be said, was fairly classy, as such things go. But whatever you do, please, please don’t buy Borat’s mankini.

OK, moving along. Men have been wearing bikini bottoms, defined as “a pair of short, close-fitting men’s swimming trunks,” by the reliably understated Oxford English Dictionary since at least the 1950s. The spring-summer Sears catalogue for 1969, for example, advertised “bikinis … [that had] sturdy elastic at [the] waist and legs”.

As a “pair of scanty, low-cut briefs,” these early mankinis were favored by sunbathers and bodybuilders, since both groups wanted to (and still want to) maximize, well, flesh exposure.

To read more about the history of female bikinis, please look to my column on Wednesday. In the meantime, don’t dwell on mankinis; doing so might make you a tad nauseous. If you have any questions, or word ideas, in the meantime, please send them to features@dailyuw.com; until Wednesday, take care!