Well-Shod

The rideshare driver who picked us up at the Savannah airport was wearing sandals. He wasn’t American, and neither were his leather slip-ons, which featured a ring for the big toe and a woven instep. They were dressy and gorgeous. If I wore sandals, I’d want something similar.

It’s summertime, and everyone except me is wearing sandals. My husband wears his with socks. Women on the street wear theirs with pedicures. There are beach sandals and dressy sandals, rubber sandals and leather ones, men’s sandals and women’s. I can’t get comfortable in any of them. Why can’t I love something that so clearly references the beach, a place I do love?

But as the daughter of a philologist, I know to ask: Are sandals really named for sand? As it turns out, sandals derives from the Greek for footwear, and the word is not even of Indo-European origin; it may have come to Greece from Persia. Sand is derived from a Greek word, changed through time and Indo-European languages to our English word today. The words sound the same but have quite different beginnings.

Etymology is a curious and fun pursuit, though parsing the science out is increasingly difficult with online dictionaries. I still turn to my paper American Heritage Dictionary at times like this (and wish I had an Oxford English Dictionary).