"hay foot straw foot" (was Re: OT: Wall Street Journal discovers linguistic relativism)

[Wilson Gray]

This story was told about Red-Army recruits when I was at the old Army
Language School in 1960. I'd never heard any such story before, so I
went for it. Indeed, we were shown a supposed Red-Army training film
in which a recruit had hay wrapped around the instep of his left boot
and straw wrapped around the instep of his right boot.  Since the film
contained a lot (or should that be "a ton"?) of other info useful to a
recruit: how to use footwraps (socks not worn), how to use the
Red-Army greatcoat as a blanket, how to put together a full-field
pack, how to field-strip one's "individual weapon" (rifle)
blindfolded, etc., I still tend to believe that the film was real.

In basic, the sergeants simply told us to step off with the left foot.
Those who failed to do so were told. "YOUR OTHER LEFT, DUD!"

I once overheard:

A. What's a "dud"?
B. I don't know. I think it's a shell that doesn't go off.

Anyone else recall the Sugarfoot Rag:

Hay foot, straw foot
Slew(?) foot drag(?)
Shake(?) your honey to
The sugarfoot rag

Not certain about the words, since I didn't like the song.

_Left_, whose root can be traced back to proto-Indo-European, doesn't
appear in print till the 13th c.?  Bite my ass! (I heard an *anecdote*
about this exclamation in the '50's, but I've heard in the wild only
once, in 1973, and, AFAIK, this is its first appearance in print.
Nope. Google has a lot / a ton of hits, starting with the UD's
surprising definition of what the literal biting of someone's ass
consists of. Who knew?).

-Wilson

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      "hay foot straw foot" (was Re: OT: Wall Street Journal discovers
>              linguistic relativism)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Jul 26, 2010, at 1:27 PM, Jonathan Lighter adds to the discussion.
>
> see Language Log here:
>
> ML, 6/29/10: Hay foot straw foot:
>  http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2415
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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