redskirt

English

Etymology

red +‎ skirt. Patterned after redshirt, which derived from the tendency for male security officers, who wore red shirts, to die on episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series. Female crew members wore minidresses, but only one red-uniformed female character was killed during the series' run, in the episode "By Any Other Name."

Noun

redskirt (plural redskirts)

1. (fiction, rare) An unimportant or expendable female character, especially one introduced only to be killed in order to underscore the peril faced by important characters.
   • 2007 February 10, Marc Goodman, “Re: Response to Steven Pinker's 'The Mystery of Consciousness'”, in alt.religion.kibology‎^[1] (Usenet):

     Wasn't there that episode where the aliens turned everyone into little blocks of styrofoam, and one of the aliens turned a redskirt and a redshirt into cubes and crumbled one of them? And then Scotty got really drunk. I seem to recall that the redskirt bought it that time.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:redskirt.

See also

• redshirt