#132 Mouseshoe

A friend of mine wrote me after one of my recent essays talking about the public parks in our area that are inaccessible by land. One of those inaccessible parks is the Odd Fellows Park. My friend, who has so much body art I sometimes call him Louvre, asked if I thought he could get into Odd Fellows Park. Naturally, I replied, you’d be a shoe in.
So where the heck does that term come from? Shoe in. Don’t tell me it was some arcane ritual to guarantee a spot at something. Like a professional fighter used to throw his hat in the ring. Or was that bullfighters? And was that before or after they took off their gloves and got down to business. Taking off your gloves to get busy predates professional boxing doesn’t it? So throwing your hat in the ring means you’re engaged, but throwing your towel in the ring means you give up. When does one put a shoe in?
Or is it a horse term? Like the horse threw a shoe. Funny, when a horse throws a shoe, unlike a person throwing a horseshoe, you never hear of him getting a ringer, but a horse that’s better than people expect, is a ringer. And if you’re exactly like him you’re a dead ringer. So, in the Middle Ages, were twins the only ones pulling the bell rope in cathedrals, and did they often have accidents? I’m sorry Monsignor, Timmy got the bell rope caught around his neck. The ways of the lord are mysterious. I am so sorry; Tell Tommy his brother’s a dead ringer.
It’s no wonder I have to pussyfoot around some words and give them the old soft shoe when it come to things like what the term shoe-in means. I thought it was like a Birkenstock hippie protest thing. Yeah, we’re against Nike sweatshops, so we’re having a shoe-in.
And it’s no wonder I have trouble understanding why modern words end up the way they do. Like mouse. No one has yet given me a convincing explanation of how the term “mouse” evolved to describe the pointer thingy we all use. “Because of its shape” is the best etymology dictionaries can come up with. Right. Maybe in the old days when it had a cord sticking out like a tail, but now? The ergonomic wonder prosthetic computer interface that I now hold, with its finger-nesting molded clickers and imbedded scroll-wheel, not to mention its laser guidance optical motion detector, doesn’t look a bit like a furry rodent. If you ask me, this is the thing we should be calling a palm pilot.
And the word splog? I find it hard to even say it. I was just getting used to blog, then they developed spam for blogs and called them splogs. If you did it to someone else you were splogging someone, or if it was done to you, you’d been splogged. Sounds uncomfortably like flogging to me. And it kind of resonates in a verbal sense. Somebody whipped my butt on my blog with spam.
I like to settle his hash.
America, ya gotta love it.