Clodhoppers

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Amber from Charlotte, North Carolina.

I am a child of the 90s, and I grew up in rural Appalachia, for context, in Western North Carolina.

And so the Spice Girls were really big, and so my dream was platform shoes.

So I got platform shoes for my birthday one year and wore the, you know, like, tried to wear them all over.

And I was just so bad with them, as any preteen is.

And so my dad and my mom would, you know, I would be walking around, and they would say,

Oh, you’re coming through the house with those clodhoppers on.

Or like, oh, go take those clodhoppers off so you can actually go do this chore or something.

And I could garner the meaning of the word roughly based on the context.

And my husband and I listen to your show all the time, so I decided to call them and ask.

I don’t think I’d ever thought of the Spice Girls platform shoes as being clodhoppers, but I get it.

I get it.

So why do we call them clodhoppers?

You are literally wearing them when you hop over clods,

The clods being clumps of earth.

They originally come from an insulting term used for country folk,

Rustics or rubes, unsophisticated people not from the city,

Where they were called a clodhopper.

It was a way of putting them down and saying that they were uncouth.

So the shoes that they wore tended to be sturdy boots or sturdy shoes

Or even clogged, C-O-L-G, and we’ll get to that in a second.

That is pretty much why they’re called cloth hoppers.

A farmer is somebody who hops over cloths as they do their work.

And I kind of like that it’s being used as a clunky shoe

By someone who traditionally would have been called the insult version of that

Because my dad was a farmer.

We grew up pretty rural.

There wasn’t a lot around.

So it’s really interesting to hear it in a different context,

And it makes me want to use it more just so that the context stays, you know, the clunky shoe.

Yeah, yeah.

It is insulting to call somebody a cloud hopper.

You’ll find it in old newspapers for several hundred years, going back to the 1600s, actually,

Where a lot of times people would call their political opponents cloud hopper,

You know, basically intimating that they weren’t educated enough or sophisticated enough

To understand the nuances of the current situation and to just bow out.

But I can see extending that term to those platform shoes because there’s something about the sound of that word.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

You can just hear it.

Well, that takes us to the word clog, which is probably related.

In the English dialect dictionary, there’s some evidence that there might be, I don’t know, word confusion or word play because clod, C-L-O-D, in U.K. English dialects could mean minors’ shoes, shoes worn by minors.

And it likely comes from the word clog, which is a sturdy work shoe with heavy soles, often made out of wood or heavy leather.

Back to the 1830s.

And Amber, I’ve got one more etymological thing for you, if you’re ready.

Yeah, yeah, please.

It’s related to the word klutz, K-L-U-T-Z, which came into English through Yiddish from a German word meaning block or lump, especially wood.

So basically, klutz is also related to clod.

So you could be a klutzhopper.

No, that doesn’t work.

But basically it’s a synonym, klutz is a synonym of blockhead, meaning somebody whose head is like a block of wood.

That’s fascinating.

Amber, thank you so much for your time and your question.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

It’s been a pleasure.

All right.

Take care.