winkle-pickers

[Michael Quinion]

> I submitted "winkle-pickers" to a (forgotten) thread here some years
> ago, referring to a non-U kind of shoe fashion in the UK that I
> suspected was long out of date.  One of the other listers with UK
> background  was unfamiliar with the term.

You have to be of a certain age to remember winkle-pickers, a fashion of
the late 1950s in the UK, especially among Mods. The name comes from the
long pointed toes, so needle-like you could almost imagine using one to
get the meat out of a winkle. The eating of bowls of winkles in our
seaside resorts is now much less common than it once was, but they were
once beloved of Cockney Harrys and Harriets out for some fun.


--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org

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