Sneakers vs. Tennis Shoes vs. Trainers

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Jill calling from Fishers, Indiana.

Hi, Jill. Welcome.

Hi, Jill.

Hi, how are you?

Super.

What’s going on in Fishers?

Well, not too much. I’m sitting in my classroom where I’m a high school English teacher, and my husband’s joined me to ask the question of you.

Your husband came to school?

Wow.

Yes, he came into school, came to grace the high school with his presence so that we could be on the show.

Oh, wow. That’s fantastic. Well, let’s get to it. What’s on your mind?

Well, my husband and I come from two different parts of the country. I’m originally from Buffalo, New York, and he is from Carmel, Indiana. And ever since we got together, we’ve been having the same debate about what to call the things that you put on your feet when you go to do something athletic.

Socks?

Well, the actual shoes.

Oh, I see.

The shoes themselves, yes. And I have always said that they are called sneakers, and he makes fun of me in the way that I say it and that there’s no sneaking going on. He doesn’t understand why it’s sneakers. And he always says that it’s tennis shoes. And this has been just kind of a funny debate along the way, but then now we have a two-year-old son, and whenever I tell him to go get his sneakers, he gets one thing, but then my husband seems to confuse him, at least I think, when he says the term tennis shoes. So we’ve been having this continuous debate, and finally we just decided one day that we needed to have you solve it.

Well, Jill, how about if we hear from your husband?

Okay, hold on one second.

Hello?

Hi, who’s this?

This is Joe McGrath.

So, Joe, what’s the deal with tennis shoes?

Oh, that’s just what they’re called. I don’t know what these East Coast people are calling them. Sneakers, I don’t really understand that.

Yeah, Buffalo’s basically Canada.

It’s pretty darn close.

Oh, so this is good. So you’ve got a two-year-old son. You’ve got two different words for the same thing. And your wife is concerned that there’s confusion. Do you think he’s really confused?

No, I think she’s confused.

Oh, I see.

Aha. Is this a marital rift? Is this a symptom of a larger problem?

No, I think we’re okay.

Okay, good. And the poor kid’s in the middle, right?

Yeah.

Well, I don’t know if you can both hear us talk about this, but I can help a little bit with this. I can at least explain why she says sneakers.

Oh, okay, good. There’s two things at play here. First, when this kind of shoe, it’s like a canvas shoe with a soft rubber sole, came about, people noticed that it was quiet because shoes prior to that often had wooden soles or they had heavy, very heavy leather soles with hobnails and nails in them, and they were noisy. They clattered when you walked on the cobblestones or plank sidewalks or plank roads or wooden floors and that sort of thing. I mean, think of a time when most floors weren’t carpeted and you might have had a rug or something, but shoes clattered. So by the time that rubber-soled shoes came along, a silent shoe was an interesting thing. And people literally called them sneakers because you could sneak around in them. I mean, it’s kind of a tongue-in-cheek joke, but that’s why they called them sneakers. Actually, because it was about sneaking. That said, in the United States today, many, many years later, sneakers, interestingly enough, is most common in the northeast of the United States. And it is less common in the whole rest of the country. In the whole rest of the country, tennis shoe is more common than sneaker.

Yeah, I grew up calling it tennis shoe.

Yeah, and so what you’ve encountered here is this cross-cultural, I’d say intracultural difference, where two different Americans grew up with this subtle difference in their language tradition, just because of accidents of history. So I think what you and Jill should do is teach your son to call the right one the tennis shoe and the left shoe the sneaker.

Oh, yeah.

What about that?

I think that’ll clear…

It wasn’t used before.

Yeah.

That’ll clear things up. You know, I want to talk to Jill in a second, but I’ll tell you this, too. It’s not really up to you guys, by the way. His friends are going to decide what he calls those things after a while.

This is true.

Once he gets old enough, whatever you’ve taught him is just going to go right out the window.

Or you could just get Crocs.

Hopefully the good stuff stays.

He’s going to call them kicks or something like that, right?

His nikes.

His nikes.

His nikes.

Yeah, something like that.

Thanks so much for talking to us.

Thank you.

Here’s Jill.

Okay, thanks.

Well, I didn’t get to hear the whole explanation.

Well, basically, we told him that you were always right and he should always do what you say.

Perfect.

No. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.

No. What we told him was a lot of jokey things, but the serious things were in the Northeast, where you come from, sneaker is more common.

That’s, yeah.

In the whole rest of the country, they mostly say tennis shoe.

Okay.

And the name literally does come from the fact that rubber-soled shoes, when they first came about, were noticed to be very quiet. And so people said, oh, hey, you can sneak around in those. They’re sneakers.

All right.

Well, thank you so much.

It’s our pleasure. And I just want to say, as we always say to teachers, you’re doing a good thing there. Salute.

Thank you very much. I really enjoy my job. I told all of my kids about this today. They were getting a big kick out of it.

Oh, fantastic.

Excellent. Well, have them drop us a line. We love to hear from students as well.

That’s a great idea.

I will.

Take care, Jill.

All right, thank you.

Say thanks to your husband.

Okay, thanks.

Bye-bye.

If you have a dispute about language, let us know about it, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.