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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
This week it is..... Get off on the wrong foot
Make a bad start to a project or relationship.
This has the sound of an old expression - from
Shakespeare, the Bible or similar. Shakespeare did use
the notion of a ‘better’ foot (which implies a wrong foot)
in King John, 1595:
KING JOHN:
Nay, but make haste; the better foot before.
O, let me have no subject enemies,
When adverse foreigners affright my towns
With dreadful pomp of stout invasion!
Be Mercury, set feathers to thy heels,
And fly like thought from them to me again.
Richard Harvey, in Plaine Perceuall the peace-maker of
England, 1590, is the first to record the wrong foot in
print: “Thou putst the wrong foote before.”
Despite the implication otherwise in the phrase put your
best foot forward we only have two choices, so if there’s
a wrong foot there has to be a right one too and get off
on the right foot is also in common use.
How did these phrases originate? Well, we don’t know. It
may be that it comes from the long-standing preference
people have for the right. Most people in all cultures are
right-handed and in English at least the bias is part of
the language. We have right and left and right and wrong,
tends to associate left and wrong. That association is
built into the language in the way that we have taken
the Latin for left - sinister, to mean dark and suspicious.
There are various disparaging terms for use of the left
that demonstrate this bias - cack-handed, goofy-footed
etc.
There is a suggestion that it in ancient Greece it was
considered unlucky to put the left foot on to the
floor, or into one’s shoe, first. Brewer records this in
his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898. There’s no
supporting evidence for that view, so here is what
Brewer had to say here:
It was thought unlucky to enter a house or to leave
one’s chamber left foot foremost. Augustus was very
superstitious on this point. Pythagoras taught that it is
necessary to put the shoe on the right foot first. “When
stretching forth your feet to have your sandals put on,
first extend your right foot” (Protreptics of Iamblichus,
symbol xii.). Iamblichus tells us this symbolised that
man’s first duty is reverence to the gods.
Another suggestion is that the concept of a right foot and
a wrong foot comes from the military, where in order to
march in step soldiers all have to start with the same
foot.
Is there an English phrase or saying that you would
like to know more about?
Email it to us on submissions@awolonline.net
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