WORD UP!

Commonly confused phrases and linguistic muddles

SHOE IN Have you ever tried to scare animals away by waving your arms towards them? If so, you were shooing them away – you might even have shouted “Shoo!” as you did so. If you thought you were shouting “Shoe!” then you were wrong. It's from the idea of shooing animals into something that we get ‘shoo-in’, meaning someone or something certain to succeed. Before being used more generally, a ‘shoo-in’ was the winner of a rigged horse race; the term later lost its connotations of rigging and simply came to mean any horse certain to win – although, clearly, if any certainty existed in horse-racing, no one would bet on it. Taken from Damp Squids & Card Sharks by Robert Anwood (Quadrille). Illustration © Daniel Rieley…

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The Simple Things (Digital) - 1 Issue, May 2024

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