Put on your shoes and socks. Born and bred. Lock and load. The reason these phrases are illogically ordered probably stems from the way one forms vowels in the mouth. If you think too hard about these terms, they start to look preposterous, the etymology of which, as it happens, has to do with putting things in the wrong order. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Shoes and Socks”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Oh, good morning. This is Doyle. I’m calling from Eureka, California. Is this Grant?
It is indeed. Hello, Doyle. Welcome to the show.
Thank you very much. Martha, are you there?
I am right here.
Good morning, Martha.
Good morning, Doyle.
What can we help you with?
Okay. Here’s the question that came up a couple of weeks ago. I’m a small manufacturer. I make this product called the candle heater, which sits on a steel stand. And in order for the stand to not abrade a surface, we plastic coat it. We dip the little feet in a plastic coat so it has something that won’t scratch like a nice table or something. And we double dip it because we just think that that’s better than just one dipping.
So the first time we dip it, we put on just maybe like a quarter of an inch of plastic coat, and we let that dry, and we call that putting on the socks. And then after a day, we come back and then we dip it further, like maybe an inch, inch and a half, you know, to get a nice foot-looking or shoe-looking thing to it. And we call that putting on the shoes.
So one of the comments that we have, you know, in the manufacturing process is, well, you know, who’s going to put on the socks and shoes on the stands today? And then the discussion came up, well, why do we say socks and shoes? We say socks and shoes because that’s what we’re doing, but in everyday language, we talk about putting on our shoes and socks, not our socks and shoes.
So I decided that the reason that we say shoes and socks is because shoes were invented before socks were invented. But the other guy that I work with, there’s actually three other guys, he says, no, the reason we say shoes and socks is because it’s easier to say shoes.
There may be something to your friend’s theory. I’m thinking that there’s a lot of things that we say that are not necessarily easy to say that we say.
Yeah, there are a lot of things, but the tongue seeks the easiest path. There’s a passage in Steven Pinker’s book, The Language Instinct, where he talks exactly about this idea, that when we have compounds or we have reduplicated phrases, we’ll say like dilly-dally or flip-flop, the vowel that comes first tends to be the vowel for which the tongue is high and in the front. And then the vowels that tend to come second in the compound are the ones where they’re low and in the back.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
So shoes and socks.
Shoes and socks. And you can do this with some other ones that are also illogical, like lock and load. Now, I’ve seen a lot of discussion online that lock and load actually for some guns might be correct. But most people understand it to be incorrect. You load it and then you lock in the chamber.
I don’t like this. I’m going to lose 50 cents on this. This is not good.
This is how you make friends. Be in their debt a little bit and they’ll love you for life.
I’m still, like, shoes came first.
Yeah, they did.
They did indeed. But language tends not to work that way very often. You do have things where there are retronyms. For example, now we have an electric guitar where previously we only had a guitar. This is because the progression from the acoustic to the electric meant we needed new terms. And we had to then rename the old object to the acoustic guitar, where it didn’t ever need to be called acoustic guitar before.
But usually language doesn’t work that way. The point of origin of a term is tied to the invention, but it doesn’t appear that way embedded in compounds or set expressions or idiomatic phrases like that.
Well, I know you guys are the research experts on this, but when I get some free time in my life, I’m going to dig on this.
If you can prove us wrong, that’d be great. We’re happy to accept new evidence at all times.
You betcha. Talk to you later.
Take care now.
Bye-bye.
All right. Bye-bye.
Grant, we got through that whole call without saying the words histaron protaron.
Oh, what did you say?
That’s naughty, right?
No, it’s not naughty. It’s a figure of speech in rhetoric when the logical elements are reversed.
Right. So the thing that you ordinarily expect to come first actually is last. So this is where we get shoes and socks is an example of histaron protaron.
Indeed. Or born and bred. The breeding comes before the borning, right?
Exactly. Interesting. And it comes from Greek words that mean the latter put in place of the former, which also reminds me of the word preposterous.
Right, because you have pre, which means before, and post, which means after, embedded right in the word.
Right. Everything’s bas-ackwards.
Bas-ackwards. So we have the formal term for it, histron-proteuron, and the informal term for it, bas-ackwards.
Exactly.
Very good. Well, and preposterous, too. Preposterous, somewhere in the middle.
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