shirttail

noun

1. The single or split (then rather plural) bottom part of a shirt, below the waist, especially in the back, which, when not tucked into trousers or other vestment, hangs over the wearer's tail-end, like a tail.

   “According to Linder, one of the rituals of the hunt entailed cutting off the shirttail of a hunter who shot at and missed a deer.”

   “She looked like the same old Molly, only more so, wearing Levis and an old cotton shirt with the shirttail out; she had a clothespin in her mouth and three or four more in the shirt pocket.”

2. (broadly)The tail-end or periphery of something.

   “There was something — did you ever catch hold of the shirttail of a dream and try to pull it back into your consciousness?”

   “Well, here we are, living in a city right on the shirttail of the city, and you're still not satisfied.”

   “James Orr joined Henry Joy McCracken and the shirttail of his force in the Slemish Mountains.”

   “When she pulled herself out of it, she was no longer homely Doreen, acne pits ruining her face, but she was, as she jokes, hanging on to the shirttail of youth.”

3. A tenuous connection.

   “Although consumers' cooperatives have not yet been benefitted, the more they become tied on to the shirttail of the agricultural bloc, the more political power they are going to have.”

   “And with the Papago Freeway tacked to the shirttail of a routine bond election, one of the great exercises of opinion-bending by an American newspaper went the full, furious distance. Nineteen seventy-three.”

   “What has been changing is that introduction of Islamic forms of law have become less dependent upon riding the shirttail of local custom, which have been at least formally protected under Indonesia law.”

4. A distant kinship.

   “She belongs to the true sisterhood of the majestic five daughters born to America's inland Neptune, but she always has been regarded as a poor relation, a sort of shirttail cousin, by her big sisters.”

   “I think we were related in a shirttail sort of way throuogh my father's family in Cordova.”

   “As I mentioned earlier, my shirttail cousin Rod was a big part of my growing up years.”

5. A small portion

   ““What good's a one-horse farm, I ask you, a few acres of tobacco and a shirttail of corn and cotton—just enough to see a man through the winter and maybe buy seed to plant and get another run till the crops are in?”

   “Other times I felt that there was enough of the real P. with me that we were both hanging on to the shirttail of the real her to keep her from destroying herself and escaping and there was a well little girl there that was strong enough that at times she wanted as much as I wanted for that little girl to dominate and crush out the sick one.”

   “I may get a small shirttail of votes, but I don't expect to be elected.”

6. Something small and unimportant.

   “He can't get no further behind. He can sholy take care of this little shirttail of a farm while me and you are whupping them Japanese.”

   “Granddaddy Bill Hogan signed up with the Glorious Cause when he won't but a shirttail of a boy, just 16 years old, and he come within a tomcat's whisker of not coming out alive.”

   “Why don't you just go ahead and lay out fer me what the hell I've got to do on a little shirttail piece of land like this?”