Slipshod and shoddy

If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies.... It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.

Albert Einstein

Being the world’s worst practitioner of DIY puts me in a position of authority when it comes to recognising shoddy workmanship – it’s my forte, although even the word workmanship implies a level of proficiency that is sadly beyond my skillset. My brothers seem to spend every weekend building their own house extensions, making floating walnut knife racks and renovating their bathrooms, which only highlights my spectacular lack of talent. Slipshod DIY I can do (under duress), and slapdash at a pinch – I once put up a shelf so beautifully angled that when I put a spirit level on it – after I’d drilled the shelf into the wall and made a nice polka dot pattern of holes, obviously – it slid straight off. Frankly, you can’t do better than that. Despite being near synonyms and phonologically similar, the words slipshod and shoddy are not related etymologically, though – this post will look at where they came from and how their meanings converged.

The second morpheme of slipshod is the old preterit and past participle form of the verb shoe ‘to wear shoes’. This shoe > shod pattern of verbs with a long vowel in the present and a short vowel in the past corresponds to many other irregular verbs in English, e.g., feel > felt; light > lit; shoot > shot. Slipshod as ‘slovenly’ was used to refer to those who preferred loafing around in slippers rather than being smartly suited and booted. It was then applied to those who were literally down at heel and were considered disreputable, untrustworthy and feckless due to their shabby appearance. While slipshod is still commonly used in this figurative ‘careless’ sense, shod has been superseded by shoed in most contexts, apart from in forms like unshod ‘without shoes’, roughshod ‘with rough shoes’ and archaisms like dry-shod, wet-shod and high-shod.  Before the advent of motorised transport, people would roughshoe horses by ensuring that the nail-heads of the horseshoes protruded from the shoes so that they had more grip on icy winter roads – it’s the same principle as wearing a pair of hobnailed boots to walk over rough, treacherous or slippery ground. Nowadays, roughshoe survives only in the idiom ride roughshod over ‘to treat without consideration, to tyrannise’, as in ‘the government rode roughshod over the rights of the refugees by rounding them up like cattle and putting them on an insanitary boat in the middle of the Thames to satisfy some right-wing nutjobs’.

The adjective shoddy ‘of poor quality’ derives from an earlier noun shoddy, a cheap yarn made by combining woollen rags, a by-product of wool processing, with a little new wool. Shoddy was originally used for padding and packaging, but then began to be used by canny manufacturers to make clothing. When it was new, shoddy cloth resembled broad cloth, but the gloss quickly wore off and it became clear that appearances were deceptive and that it was cheap and nasty. During the American Civil War (1861-1865), shoddy was imported from Britain in vast quantities and used to make military uniforms and army blankets. It was heartily despised by the soldiers, who would curse the cloth and the contractors who had made a fortune out of such an inferior material and were thus widely regarded as unscrupulous rogues. In fact, a new term, shoddyocracy, was coined to describe those who were perceived to be profiteering out of the war, an unpatriotic affront to the brave soldiers dying on the battlefield. This disgust is outlined in a work entitled The Days of Shoddy: A Novel of the Great Rebellion in 1861, which was published by American journalist and author Henry Morford in 1863. (The Great Rebellion is an alternative name for the American Civil War and illustrates the Unionists’ attitude towards the secessionists of the Confederacy.) The meaning of shoddy rapidly evolved to become a general adjective for anything that was made on the cheap without due care and attention. The Days of Shoddy rails against the litany of poor-quality goods given to the soldiers in the Civil War: ‘shoddy coats, shoddy shoes, shoddy blankets, shoddy tents, shoddy horses, shoddy arms, shoddy ammunition, shoddy boats, shoddy beef and bread’ (Morford 1863: 174).

It is thought that shoddy is derived from shoad ‘loose fragments of ore and rock mixed with earth, separated from the main vein by the action of water or the weather’. Shoad has several parallels to shoddy yarn which make this etymology plausible: both are waste products from industry (shoad is a by-product of mining), both are mainly composed of worthless material, and both were recognised as being of substandard quality but were still used – in the case of shoad, for building. Shoad is from the same source as the verb shed, Old English sceadan ‘separate, divide, distinguish’, which in turn can be traced back to Proto-Germanic *skaiþana, also ‘separate’, and ultimately the Proto-Indo-European root *skei- ‘cut, split, part, distinguish, separate’. *Skei- was a very productive root, with the result that it has left thousands of descendant words across contemporary Indo-European languages. Modern English examples include schism, sheath, and shit, which have obvious links to the root’s central theme of ‘separation’; shin, ski and escutcheon ‘shield’ (with its derivatives esquire and squire – a squire was originally a shield-carrier), which are bones or boards cut from a bigger whole; and science, prescience, nice, conscience, conscious and omniscient (all from Latin scire ‘know’), which are based on the idea of discernment, knowing how to discriminate by separating the wheat from the chaff. All of these words are distant cousins of the black sheep of the family, shoddy, but their staying power and breadth of meaning are also evidence that the legacy of this Proto-Indo-European root is not shoddy in the slightest.