Ojo’s “Ruffled Waist”?

This is the cover of The Patchwork Girl of Oz as redesigned and redrawn by Dick Martin, based on John R. Neill’s art for the first edition’s dust jacket. (See David Maxine’s masterful dissection of this edition at the Hungry Tiger Press.) This is the cover art of the edition I read as a boy.

In chapter two, L. Frank Baum described the young Munchkin hero Ojo’s appearance this way:

He wore blue silk stockings, blue knee pants with gold buckles, a blue ruffled waist and a jacket of bright blue braided with gold. . . .

I don’t recall being held up by the phrase “blue ruffled waist,” though if I’d thought about it, it wouldn’t have made any sense to me. I could see in the illustrations that Ojo wore an elaborate ruff around his neck, not his waist. In fact, how could anyone wear a “waist” since that’s part of the body?

TOMORROW: What a waist was.