Now, if you’re one of my more, erm, mature readers, you might be thinking of DCI Frank Burnside from ‘The Bill’ (I just googled him and his entry on ‘The Bill’ wiki – yes, that’s a thing – says ‘built his reputation on good detective work combined with his unique approach of putting informants’ heads down the toilet’. They don’t make ’em like that anymore). Unfortunately this doesn’t have anything to do with long-running police procedural dramas, but it does have a military background, which I’ll get to in a minute. It’s also my second (spoiler alert!) beard-related word in two weeks – make of that what you will.
Excellent facial hair, questionable military tactics
So, burnsides are another name for sideburns – strips of facial hair growing down your cheeks and connecting to a moustache, but with a clean-shaven chin. They’re named after one General Ambrose Burnside whose face hair was so distinctive it spawned a whole new genre (?). Which was lucky, as he was a pretty crap general – his most notable achievement was a crushing defeat in the American Civil War.
The savvy among you will have realised that sideburns is just burnsides swapped round. Annoyingly, I can’t find out how or why this happened – maybe it just made more sense to people as (in a happy coincidence) they’re on the side of your face?
A sideburn fact for you: sideburns went out of fashion in the early 20th century. One of the reasons for this was war – to keep a gas mask on your face you needed to be clean-shaven (which meant ’taches were still okay).
(Oh, and in case you’re wondering what sideburns were called before the 1800s, the answer is, rather disappointingly, ‘side whiskers’.)