dress shirt associated with dress, polo

[curiousmarcus]

Wikipedia: A dress shirt, button shirt, button-front, button-front shirt, or button-up shirt is a garment with a collar and a full-length opening at the front, which is fastened using buttons or shirt studs.

I'm posting because my young son resists wearing a dress shirt,simply because he associates it with a dress. And he is not going to wear a dress. I checked N-gram and saw that dress shirt is by far the most commonly used term. He also doesn't want to get dressed, but rather he wants to put on his clothes. In our culture, dress has a strong connotations for the one piece garment worn by women. I just want to know if that is the same for other cultures.

By the way, local people here refer to dress shirts as polo. It's wrong (as polo shirts are what is shown below), but that's what they call it here. Do you think it is better to teach the wrong term for the sake of being understood?

 

[GoesStation]

The local term is the correct word in your country. It wouldn't be understood in the United States, so you should use dress shirt or a synonym when you're here or communicating with Americans.

The noun dress means a one-piece garment usually worn by women. The adjective dress means "formal". It applies equally to male and female clothing.

The verb dress can mean to put on clothes, to cover a wound, or to apply a light sauce to food. It has no connection to one gender or another.

You could call dress shirts button-down shirts.