athletic shoes (yellow pages)

[Jonathan Lighter]

This exchange has reminded me, against my will, of a local frank and burger joint that was called

                                          BETWEEN THE BUNS

  Elsewhen, I made my first purchase from The Athlete's Foot in 1978.  My grandmother, at that point a new nonagenarian with a lifelong horror of fungal athlete's foot, laughed and said she thought that "whoever thought of that name was clever."

  I would have said "thought up that name," but so it goes.

  JL



"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: athletic shoes (yellow pages)
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On Sep 23, 2006, at 11:30 AM, Alison Murie wrote:

> Thanks, arnold, for the entertaining account of your voyage of
> discovery
> through the yellow-leaved forest. I was having a similar experience
> hiking around the acres of K-Mart looking for a likely shelf on
> which to
> find a reflector pan for a stove-top element I had just had to
> replace.
> None of the likely-looking headsigns yielded what I wanted. Now I
> don't
> remember what the dept. was that did!

i have some interest in taxonomies of all kinds. the yellow pages
taxonomy (and the in-store taxonomy you confronted) are interesting
cases that lie somewhere in between folk taxonomies and taxonomies
devised for some technical purpose. the actual categories are
slanted towards folk categorization, but the labels given to those
categories are often not ordinary-language terms.

> It must have been an extraordinarily tone-deaf merchant who named
> his shop
> The Athlete's Foot! Or am I hopelessly out-of-date in thinking
> "athlete's
> foot" is still a particularly intractable fungal infection that
> people go
> to great lengths to avoid?

no, you're absolutely right about the fungal infection (tinea
pedis). i'm sure the store name was chosen in full knowledge of the
idiomatic meaning of the expression; that just makes it really
memorable, while still conveying the literal meaning of the
expression, as a helpful pointer to the nature of the store.

arnold, trying to imagine what a store called Jock Itch (after tinea
cruris) would be like

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