The Equine Roots of Shoo-in

Hello,

I was reading an article this morning and the author said that somebody wasn’t a shoo-in for a new political role. It stopped me in my tracks as I realised a) although I use this phrase in speech I’ve never written it down and b) it’s spelled shoo-in not shoe-in.

Naturally, that made shoo-in a shoo-in for this morning’s blog post.

shoe-in or shoo-in

A shoo-in is an easy winner, especially in politics. The expression dates to the early 1900s and is formed by joining shoo and in. I’m assuming you know about the word in, but what about shoo? It’s much older, dating to the early 1600s with shoo being what you’d call out to drive away birds or other creatures. This possibly started with hens and was earlier spelled as shou. There are similar words in various languages – chou in French, schu in German, sou in Greek – but we can’t trace the roots back any further.

How do we get from hens to politicians? It’s easy if you hop on a horse.

A shoo-in during the 1930s was a horse who wins thanks to race-fixing. A jockey would hold back their own horse and shoo the winner across the finish line. If you bet on a shoo-in you’d go home a happy punter.

It was a short, and rapid, move from the world of crooked horse-races to the idea of a person being a shoo-in for a political job and the expression stuck.

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

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