Knickerbocker

The word entered common use as a meaningless but Dutch-sounding name, used by Washington Irving in 1809 as a pen-name for his fake history of the New Amsterdam colony. Later in the nineteenth century it came to mean whatever Dutch-ancestry families were in New York as well as whatever remnants – physical, literary, or linguistic – of the Dutch colony had survived into the present. It somehow is also a name for short baggy pants that have tight cuffs below the knee. Since 1946, it has been used as the name of a basketball team.