Wordwatch: Shoo-in

In a recent issue of The Spectator, I came across the following phrase: “…if there were a competition to find an entity less trustworthy than big tech to decide what all the world’s citizens can say, know and hear, then the European Commission and von der Leyen would surely be a shoe-in.”

“Shoe-in”? What on earth can that possibly mean? We have come to use the expression to mean a doddle, a dead cert, a no-brainer, but what has that to do with shoes?  Could the phrase intended be “shoo-in”? “Shoo” being a common interjection with the sense of hustle or hurry, often accompanied by gestures implying urgency or compulsion. It’s particularly used to get children or animals to move from one spot to another, or away altogether. But even with that spelling, what is “shoo-in” doing in our daily speech? I’ve met several “shoe-ins” lately, so the phrase must be catching on. Perhaps those using it haven’t quite twigged what it means?

That’s understandable. Its origin is not obvious, and, needless to say I’m afraid, it comes from the United States. It’s a relatively recent import but is recorded in my 1988 Chambers Dictionary where we are told it is “U.S. slang” and comes from racing. A “shoo-in” is a horse that is shooed in, and that too is a “technical term”; it means that the horse was dishonestly enabled to win a race. It’s nothing to do with the shoeing of the horse, the activity that Gerard Manley Hopkins so wonderfully described in his poem about the farrier Felix Randall, who would “fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal.”

So, from a piece of criminal American horse-racing slang, “shoo-in” has become a common expression here in Britain, and we sort of know how to use it.  But a lot of us haven’t the faintest idea how to spell it, or what it actually means. That sums up our culture now, I think. It comes from the US; we hear about it and we don’t really understand it – but we blithely adopt it all the same. It’s the way language happens.