Etymology of Cobble

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Terry Thompson from Columbia, Ohio.

Hi, Terry, welcome.

What can we do for you?

I am a professional shoemaker or cobbler, what we used to be called.

Cool.

And I’m wondering why the word cobbler has been used as a derogatory term for people that don’t know their profession.

They’ll say the guy is a shoemaker or he cobbled it up.

And the profession of shoemaking has always been an honorable profession.

I don’t know where it got morphed out to mean something less professional, that you’re not doing a good job at it.

So you’re thinking of when somebody says he cobbled together a solution, it means he slapped it together in a kind of roughshod way without any real finesse.

Yes.

Or he might be a mechanic who says, he’s just a shoemaker.

Oh, yeah.

That’s another one.

I don’t take a sense at it.

I just say, it’s interesting because I am a shoemaker.

And they look at me and say, really, are any of those still around?

Yeah, I’m curious how you got into it.

I basically got hurt.

I was a structural steel welder, welded huge pieces of equipment.

I hurt my back.

And I fell back on a hobby that I had in Arizona when I was growing up.

I hand-tooled and made saddles.

Oh, yeah.

And made belts and stuff.

So I figured, how hard would it be to repair shoes?

So when I got hurt, I bought a shoe repair shop, and I started repairing shoes, and then I started making shoes, and that was 40 years ago.

Wow, that’s cool.

Oh, wow, that is really cool.

And so your question is, why is this honorable profession put down by people thinking of cobbling as something half-hearted, and why is shoemaker used as a pejorative in some industries?

Because it’s also used in cooking and in kitchens.

Professional chefs will call somebody who’s not up to snuff or up to par a shoemaker or a shoemaker.

Yeah, yeah, that’s true. I did hear it. Yeah, I did hear them, yeah.

And there’s teen slang from the 1950s of calling somebody a shoemaker as a boy who’s not particularly intelligent.

I did not know that. Wow.

Yeah, there’s a ton of, there’s even a word in French, which is kind of, has two meanings.

One is shoemaker.

One is a worker of the worst description, according to this old dictionary.

I think it goes back to when cobbler wasn’t the person who made shoes.

They were the person who mended shoes.

And they might take a bunch of different shoes and piece them together to make a new shoe.

So I might get some hand-me-down shoes from the wealthier person in the village and go to the cobbler.

And he would take these shoes and a sole from here and upper from there and da-da-da-da and make me a pair of shoes.

And so it was clearly a patch job.

The old name for somebody who made shoes was a cordwainer, C-O-R-D-W-A-I-N-E-R, cordwainer.

And actually with an interesting etymology from Cordoba in Spain.

And it referred to this particular product that came out of a particular place.

I don’t know what else to say, but I think that that’s where the original misunderstanding of cobbler lies.

However, cobbler now is generally synonymous with shoemaker, and so we’ve lost that older distinction where a cobbler was just the person who mended shoes or patched them together, and a cordwain or a shoemaker was somebody who actually made them from scratch, you know, original leather, original soles, and this whole thing.

And, yeah, we talk about cobbling together a solution.

It’s kind of a half-hearted kind of makeshift solution, which isn’t all that complementary necessarily.

Well, Terry, I want to leave you with something which may give you a feeling of kind of the importance of your trade.

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, there’s a part where they do a pun on the two meanings of cobbler, where a cobbler was not necessarily somebody who fixed shoes, but they could repair anything, kind of a mender of whatever.

And so there’s this whole passage where they’re trying to, somebody of authority says to a cobbler, what are you? He says, I’m a cobbler. He’s like, yeah, but what are you?

And there’s a part where he’s speaking, this cobbler, and he says, truly, sir, all that I live by is with the all, A-W-L.

I meddle with no tradesman’s matters, nor woman’s matters, but withal, I am indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes.

When they are in great danger, I recover them.

As proper men as ever trod upon neat’s leather have gone upon my handiwork.

And by neat’s leather, that’s the leather from the animals that have neat foots.

Right?

Neat feet, the particular split of the hoof.

Right, right.

And so it’s really nice.

He’s proud of his profession.

He’s speaking truth to power, essentially, and saying, I’m not just a cobbler.

Men walk upon my work.

I support the greatest men of the world.

Yeah, that’s cool.

That’s really cool.

I’m very proud of my profession.

I don’t take offense to that because I’m the only one within hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles.

I mean, I don’t know of any other shoemakers.

Well, Mr. Shoemaker, we are happy to take your call.

Give us a call another time, anytime you want to talk about language in the shoe trade, all right?

All right.

Thank you very much.

Take care.

Thanks, Terry.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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