The Origins of “Shoo-In”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi. This is Hamid calling from San Diego.

Hi, Hamid. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

What’s on your mind?

You know, my wife is a recruiter, and she’s always constantly trying to fill these high-profile roles.

And she’ll come home from work and say, you know, I spoke to this candidate, and this candidate’s a shoe-in.

And she says that all the time.

I’ve always wondered, you know, what does that necessarily mean?

And what maybe the history behind that was.

I always thought it was a real interesting way of saying something was guaranteed or easy or obvious, but I didn’t really understand or couldn’t really, there’s not much to it to really get much out of it, to really understand where it came from.

And, Hamid, how are you spelling it?

I don’t think we’ve ever actually put it on paper.

I think it’s just been one of those things that we’ve just kind of verbally thrown around.

Okay, okay.

Are you picturing a shoe like somebody getting a foot in the door?

That’s exactly what I’m thinking.

I don’t know if it was maybe my natural feeling would be maybe a shoe that fit well.

Maybe, you know, it was just a natural fit.

You know, the shoe fit perfect.

But really I’m not sure.

Okay.

Well, this may surprise you, but it’s not even spelled that way.

It’s S-H-O-O hyphen in, a shoe in.

And the shoe in this case is the kind of shoe when, say, a pesky gnat is flying around your face and you wave it away and you shoe it away.

You know, you’re shoeing chickens around a barnyard or something.

So you’re making this noise saying, shoe, shoe, and you’re literally driving them away, say, with your hands or something.

Or driving them toward a goal rather than away.

Yeah, toward a goal.

Yeah, and Grant is leading up to the other really cool part of this expression, shoe in, because it comes from the world of horse racing.

And the fact that sometimes when people would rig a horse race and they would secretly agree, well, this horse is going to win, and all the jockeys agree on that,

Then what happens in this sort of prearranged race is essentially that the other horses sort of shoe the winner across the finish line.

It’s like they’re driving the winner across the finish line, and so that winner is a shoe-in.

I had no idea.

Yeah, I literally thought it was a well-fitting sneaker.

I had no idea.

That’s as far as I got with it.

Yeah, and in the horse racing, the other thing there to keep in mind is it usually was a horse that wasn’t expected to win.

So there’s a little bit of a joke there.

If you’re shooing it in, it’s a horse that just can’t do it without some encouragement.

So everyone else is reining back their horses, and this glue factory nag is just having to be, like, provoked just to get across the tape.

Wow.

Well, then that makes it seem like it’s not a well-deserving, you know, victory.

Although it’s changed now.

Now it is.

Now it typically means like they’re a cinch, they’re a lock, they’re a natural.

Yeah.

And there’s no negative connotation now.

Well, no, that’s great.

Very interesting.

Thank you, Kate, so much.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah, sure, Hamid.

Really appreciate it.

Take care.

Thanks for calling.

All right.

You’re going to have a great day.

Thank you.

You know, we get so many terms from horse racing.

And another one that has to do with winning is the term hands down.

You know, somebody’s a winner hands down.

And that refers to when the jockey is so far ahead of the other horses that he or she can just relax.

No, so they don’t have their reins up.

Yeah, yeah.

They’re winning hands down.

So a shoe in wins hands down.

And I wanted to talk a second about shoe.

That’s onomatopoeic for this noise that we make, right?

But it exists in other European languages, this shoe noise used to encourage animals or kids or other things that need to be herded to do stuff.

Shoe.

Shoe, yeah.

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