Only a nation with no ear would buy a pant

To the growing list of crimes against humanity ascribed to the United States of America, may I add a further? The Chatfield Pant. Let others, more familiar with the Ralph Lauren range of casual clothes for angularly rangy types of all ages, rail against The Keating Pant and The Andrew Pant, I rest my case on The Chatfield Pant.

That The Chatfield Pant is a traditional, zippered, flat-fronted chino, clean-fitting, classically perpendicular, of a military design, with not too much roominess in the rise, seat and leg, you hardly need me to tell you. Ditto that it comes in navy, nubrick and black, the nubrick winning it hands down for me every time. Whether you do as Ralph Lauren suggests and wear it with an Oxford Blake shirt for "pure Polo style" is a matter entirely for your own conscience, but I wouldn't have you in my house if you did. Not that you would come if I invited you. If I have never hit it off with people who wear The Chatfield Pant, it must in all honesty be said that they have never hit it off with me.

All this, of course, is no less true of Ralph Lauren clothes in general. It takes a particular kind of man to want an embroidered polo player astride his left nipple. Occasionally, when I am tired and emotional, or consumed with self-dislike, I try to imagine myself as someone else, a wearer of Yarmouth shirts and fleecy sweats, of windbreakers and rugged Tyler shorts, of baseball caps with polo players where the section of the brain that concerns itself with aesthetics is supposed to be. But the hour passes. Good men return from fighting Satan in the wilderness the stronger for their struggle, and so do I.

The Chatfield Pant, however, offends against more than mere style. The Chatfield Pant is a language violation of a peculiarly American sort. Why the definite article? When a man goes into his wardrobe to decide how he would like to look, he does not say I think will wear The Levi Jean today, together with The Brogue Shoe, The Pantella Sock and The Silk Tie. Nor will he, I suspect, remember to apply the definite article to The Chatfield Pant once it has passed into his possession. So why the The at the time of marketing?

Let's stop beating about the bush. It all comes down to American ignorance of the arts of civilisation. Lacking assurance in such matters as adorning the human body, Americans do one of two things: either they dress like Scotsmen, or they seek refuge in grammar, hoping that the definite article will make them definitive. The two are probably related. Think the malt whisky that calls itself The Macallan. If you have never visited America and would like a picture of the place, picture this – 200 million Americans standing on their tartan carpets (The Tartan), all in The Chatfield Pant, all drinking The Macallan.

Absurdity piles upon absurdity. Once you employ the definite article, you are lumbered with the singular noun. You cannot, can you, have The Chatfield Pants. But what you sometimes give to grammar, you often take from euphony and sense. A pant is preposterous. Only a nation with no ear would buy a pant. But then only a nation with no ear would study math. There is no point in arguing this. Maths is right, math is wrong. You hear it or you don't. Your lookout. Ask yourself this question, though: do you really want to follow into war a country that thinks that math sounds right?

As for the Chatfield element of The Chatfield Pant, I am not able to shed light. I have unearthed a Thomas Chatfield of Ditchling, in Sussex, active in the second half of the 15th century, but whether he was active designing flat-fronted chinos with not too much roominess in the rise, I cannot say. The Chatfield family motto – "Pro aris et focis" – does sound as though it could have something to do with trousers, but it turns out to mean "For Altars and Hearths", which would have helped us only had we been looking for a maker of candles and fire-furniture – The Chatfield Wick, say, or The Chatfield Tong. Pursue it further yourself, if genealogy's your thing.

There is evidence that Thomas Chatfield's descendants made their way to America, and who's to say they were not the founding fathers of the towns of Chatfield in Arkansas, Minnesota, Oregon and Texas, tight-in-the-rise chino-wearing places without a doubt. My own guess is that Chatfield is meant to sound aristocratic, suggesting Chatsworth, Chatham, chateau and Chateaubriand, with a field thrown in for striding through. The usual woeful purloining, in other words – as in American high art, so in American low fashion – of the cultural associations of others.

Better, anyway, if we must part from America, that we do so over The Chatfield Pant, not its foreign policy. Trust the small things, I say. Burdened with the information that his uncle had murdered his father in order to get into his mother's pants – pants, note, not pant – Hamlet loses himself in meditation. But let him find Polonius behind the arras, listening in, and he can act swifter than an arrow. Snooping we know what to do with. Murder and incest are more difficult. So goes the world around. In the end, we leave the enormities to God.

This, in the light of the hysterical abuse being heaped by the day now on America. "The current American élite is the Third Reich of our times," thunders John Pilger, picking up the vogue for calling everyone you disagree with a Nazi. But then Pilger always was more Timon than Hamlet, his speciality the big crime. Without doubt, Pilger's apocalyptic prose has served us well in the past; the trouble is, it of necessity grows hungry by what it feeds on. Now a bigger crime, and now a bigger still, until there is no differentiation left.

Forget the Third Reich. Be guided, rather, by The Chatfield Pant.