The growing majesty of Wikipedia continues to amaze.
Just stumbled across this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_shoes
“Huh?” (you grunt). “Concealed shoes?? That’s a topic for an encyclopedia??”
Well, yes, if it is the Encyclopedia Galactica, which Wiki
is striving to be.
Here is an excerpt from the article. (Only the English Wiki covers the
subject.)
Several theories have been advanced
to account for the incorporation of shoes into the fabric of a building, one of
which is that they served as some kind of fertility charm. There is a
long-standing connection between shoes and fertility, perhaps exemplified by
the nursery rhyme, "There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe", and
the custom of casting a shoe after a bride as she leaves for her honeymoon or
attaching shoes to the departing couple's car. Archaeologist Ralph Merrifield has observed that in the
English county of Lancashire females who wished to conceive might try on the
shoes of a woman who had just given birth, a custom known as smickling.
Well, that’s enough fun for one Sunday; back to more weighty
pursuits. But in the meantime,
Enjoy the autumn, and -- Happy
Smickling!
And when y'all are done smickling, perhaps ye'd like to go on a skimmity ride !!
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|
“O, wilt thou go
a-smickling,
a-smickling, a-smickling,
wilt thou go a-smickling,
a-smick-l-ing with me!”
|
For more sweet courtship lore from our Anglo-Saxon past, click here:
Google finds only 3,750 hits for "smickling". Many of them are sarcastic rhymes for "pickling", or someone's surname. Remarkably many of them seem to be related to the slang sense of "to pass on an infection". I didn't check every page, but those I did check had no references to "wearing the shoes of a person who just gave birth".
ReplyDeleteIn fact, googling for "lancashire smickling" seems to find mostly copies of that one story, unconfirmed. Plus there's false hits like this one, which mentions Lancashire dialect words and also mentions "smickling" (but in the pass-on-an-infection sense and the citation is for Yorkshire).
Thank you, Comrade Pyesetz! Should the ‘shoe’ sense of “smickle” prove an illusion, we can always continue to use the word in that other sense, in relation to the ebola crisis.
Delete