'Foe of baggy pants urges statewide ban', screams a banner headline in today's edition of our endearingly named (and extremely good) local paper, the Times-Picayune.

Local councilman Ronnie Smith has amended the indecent exposure ordinance in his parish (the Louisiana equivalent of a county) to fine anyone exposing their underwear in public. His is the latest of a growing number of communities to introduce such bans amid the vogue for 'low-rider' jeans.

A couple of weeks ago, in a gas station in Tennessee, we saw an example of the kind of person Smith is targeting.

A black teenager shambled across the forecourt towards his car, counting his change with one hand and holding up his beltless trousers with the other. Every so often they would fall to his ankles, and only when he reached a convenient break in his conversation with two friends would he stoop to retrieve them. All the while, his blue-and-green checkered underpants were on prominent display.

I sat there gaping until Pam admonished me. 'It's a free country,' she pointed out. 'If he wants to look stupid, that's his right.'

I couldn't agree with her more, and human rights groups across the country are up in arms, saying the rules are a violation of the constitutional entitlement to free expression.

Ronnie Smith's ban was modelled on one already imposed by Lafourche parish, where councilman Lindel Toups somewhat confusingly contends: 'We're not telling (people) how to dress, just how to wear their clothes'.

I'm not sure which is the greater human folly: a young man's belief that walking around in his boxers makes him anything but a laughing stock, or a lawmaker's hubris in assuming that he has any right to intervene.

Of course all this is a storm in a teacup, a positively picayune matter. Which brings me to the question: why would one of the country's most respected newspapers want to describe itself as 'small and of little importance', which is how Webster's online dictionary defines this word?

Well, when the paper was launched in 1837, its price was one picayune - a Spanish-American coin equivalent to a sixteenth of a dollar and derived from the Louisiana French picaillon.

The paper also publishes a weekly listings supplement called Lagniappe, a word I'd never seen before I came here, though with my semi-autistic Scrabble-player mentality I immediately spotted that it was an anagram of 'appealing'.

Once again, my wife-to-be enlightened me. 'It's a little extra gift, like when you buy a dozen beignets and the guy throws in one more for free,' she said. Lagniappe (lan-yap) is another Louisiana French word, this time from the American Spanish la ñapa, and most people round here are familiar with it.