Clackers Footwear

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kim calling from Hartford, Connecticut.

Hi, Kim, how are you doing?

I’m good. I have a question about flip-flops.

All right, shoot.

Well, when I was a kid, I would call them clackers, and my friend would make fun of me because she called them thongs. She insisted they were thongs. And recently I heard a radio story that mentioned maybe 20 different names for them, probably not that many, but, you know, clackers were not in there. So I asked my mom about it, and she insisted that she didn’t make up the word. So I’m just wondering where that might have come from. The only other thing I came up with from other people was zoris.

Oh, yeah. Is that a Japanese word for them?

Yeah, exactly. The woven ones, woven with fiber of some kind.

Yeah, we’re talking about the shoes that are floppy, like rubber sole shoes that your feet are exposed. And they have the upright that goes between your big toe and the next toe, right?

Those are always uncomfortable for me.

That’s why they’re called the thong, by the way, and the same reason the underwear is called the thong. You have a part of it goes between two parts of the body.

Yeah, totally uncomfortable either way.

Yeah, and you called them clackers growing up.

Yeah.

Gosh, boy, clackers brings back a totally different memory for me.

What are you thinking of? False teeth?

No, that’s in the future. The toy that you banged together?

The toy. Oh, my gosh. Kim, did you ever play with clackers the toy when you were growing up?

Yeah, it’s like those glass balls, and I think they’re illegal because they chip or something.

Yes.

You can get the plastic ones.

Yes, you can get those hard plastic balls, one on each end of a rope, and you hold the middle of the rope and you go clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.

Yeah, those were all the rage when I was in junior high, and the principal had to take them away from people and bang. Everybody was doing it. It was just mind-boggling.

That’s a different sound than flip-flops.

I’m having a disconnect here. I’m not hearing flip-flops as going clack at all. It’s a thwop or a thwack or a flup, but it’s not a clack.

No, it’s kind of, to me, maybe because my mother brainwashed me, but to me it’s very much like a slapping clack, clack, clack.

Slapping.

Yeah, yeah. I might call them thwackers, but that would just be my own word.

The only sense that I’ve seen of clackers in terms of shoes is like the metal tips that go under shoes to prevent them getting worn down.

Right. Exactly. So clackers intentionally put on tap shoes. And there was a style at some point, I want to say the 50s, to put these on your shoes so you did make the noise. Stiletto shoes or the women who wear stiletto shoes are sometimes called clackers, and it’s used in the Devil Wears Prada. I believe the book and maybe the movie.

Really? In the Devil Wears Prada?

Clackers, but that’s the only shoe that I know of that’s a clacker.

Kim though, a really nice thing about doing this show is that we are heard around the United States, all of North America and throughout the world. And so if somebody else uses clackers to refer to flip-flops or thong shoes, then we will hear about it, alright?

Oh, that’ll be very interesting.

And we’ll let you know.

All right.

Thanks for calling. Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

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