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Note that in the following I follow the American usage of 'pants' rather than 'trousers'.
I hope you are all familiar with that old phrase affirming the common humanity and deflating the hero worship of so-called 'great men': you know the Einsteins, Mozarts, daVinciani, Hitlers, Stalins and of course Donalds Trump by affirming that "Just like other men he put his pants on one leg at a time".
The exact origin of the phrase is unknown or, as we say in the trade, OOO, 'Of Obscure Origin', it is said by some to be a common Texas regionalism popularised by Francis Schmidt, a football coach at Ohio State University in about 1934. Apart from that I can only come up with just a hint as to its general theory of evolution in this from Boswell's Life of Johnson:
"We talked of the education of children; and I asked him what he thought was best
to teach them first. Johnson: "Sir, it is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the mean time your breech is bare."
So there we have pretty well all there is; so that nowadays apart from certain of the more flamboyantly patriotic Scotsmen; and, from time to time, David Bowie; and of course George Eliot all great men can be said, when commenting on their lack of difference from mere slobs in the street, to put their pants on one leg at a time—indeed this fact has led me, from the time I was a young man, and as a direct challenge hurled into the face of the dictum—to develop a technique of lying on the bed in my underwear and my feet waving in the air like a dying Gaul or perhaps more like a dying cockroach, and writhing around until I could put my pants on BOTH legs at a time. I would occasionally fall off the bed with a loud bang and often a louder "Ouch!" to the consternation of those about and particularly below my location, but otherwise this has been a successful and indeed a noble enterprise. And so now when people say "Well that RHB, he may write all those weird and occasionally mildly amusing essays on the radio and stuff, but he still puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like any other man!" Cognoscenti, such as you, can leap out at them and cry "No, actually, he doesn't!!"
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