Пифагоровы штаны
на все стороны равны
(All sides of Pythagorean trousers are equal).

Alexey: are there any Russian puns here we need to know about? As written, the verse is amusing (rather Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear) but doesn’t seem to help mnemonically! Quite the opposite, in fact. The theorem concerns the sides of a right-angled triangle (x-squared + y-squared = hypotenuse-squared) and it’s easy to prove that these three sides cannot ALL be equal in the Euclidean (flat) plane (as specified in the theorem). Interestingly, all three sides can be equal In curved spaces of the kind that Nabokov distrusted.

Trousers (also pants, breeches, breeks, kecks) are also funny in English literature and idioms. You can be caught with them down (Clinton). Rolling up the bottoms is a sign of age (T S Eliot). Dominant wives wear the trousers figuratively (Mrs Bennett). At night, Felix folds them over the back of a chair with proletarian tidiness (a truly Nabokovian, unexpected insight in Despair). The Irish anti-hero improvises: Brian O’Lynn had no breeches to wear, so he got an ould sheepskin to make him a pair; with the woolly side out and the hairy side in, Sure they’re pleasant and cool, sez Brian O’Lynn.
We now have the verb, to trouser. Honest money can be pocketed with a clear conscience, but obscene Bankers’ bonuses are always trousered.
Stan Kelly-Bootle.

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