To strut; to put on stately airs.
I have never been much of a prinkster, in either the old meaning or the current. The old meaning of "prink" is to strut about with airs, the newer meaning is to wear special clothes so as to look attractive.
As evidence of my prinklessness I point to the Ascot-Chang shirt in my closet. I bought that shirt in 1992 for $85, which was a tremendous amount of money for me at the time and by most standards simply a lot of money to pay for a shirt.
I do not recall if I articulated it to myself, but I think I bought this shirt imagining I might need suitable attire as I made my seemingly inexorable rise through corporate. These delusions were not entirely of my own mental fantasticalities. I was pretty well regarded at the company and talk of sending me off to some kind of executive school had me thinking I was on my way to corporate greatness — a phrase I now think is a bit of an oxymoron.
It has been about 16 years since I bought that shirt, and today it hangs in my closet, unworn. I have never put it on. I have never unbuttoned the buttons or held the shirt up in contemplation of wearing it.
I have noticed the Ascot-Chang shirt the times I have moved to new apartments. I have always packed it up and taken it with me, then hung it in the new closet at the new apartment. I regard its stateless presence with a certain familiarity, but I am not sure if that regard is happy or oblivious. I do not know why I keep it, or if I will ever wear it, but there it is, a trophy of some sort.
When I first worked in corporate I occasionally tried to get a fresh start on a stupid job by wearing a tie or buying an expensive shirt. It was pointless, and only made me conspicuous among colleagues who knew me as a casual dresser with no reason to impress anyone. I was not in sales nor was I employed in any capacity which might benefit from an artificially enhanced appearance.
My first corporate Internet job came in 1995, and at the time the fashion called for the web people to dress "slovenly casual."
I remember clearly a meeting at which I and some others showed up dressed in years-old tennis shoes, pants with large holes torn in them, and t-shirts which might have made reference to pot or hard drinking.
We faced a large number of men in suits who regarded the Internet as an uncertain joke. Perhaps because of this low regard with which they held the then-new World Wide Web it seemed most of them did not regard our sartorial tastes (or us) as significant.
