Part 1. Locke, Croc, and Paddle
On the last Saturday in June 2024 we began the odyssey back from Iona to London. The first leg of the journey, the ferry from Iona to Fionnphort on Mull, is also the shortest. This time, as we gingerly made our way off the ferry onto the jetty at Fionnphort, seawater splashed up periodically between the cracks of the metal ramp on which we made our descent. This to and fro of the waves adds a slight sense of ceremony to the act of disembarking. While the thick-soled or those especially eager to claim the best seats on the bus thrust ahead, gentler souls—you could say the more tentative, but I would say those with a keener sense of timing—pause, the water’s woosh their cue to descend as the waves retreat, like the “and” that cues you to come in on the first note of an eight-bar phrase in a dance class.
When the water splashes Mum’s feet she says to my brother, who is holding her hand, that it is only fitting since her middle name is De Mouilpied, named after a place in Guernsey in the Channel Islands, where her mother grew up. According to my mother’s eldest sister, in email correspondence from 2018, “Mother’s grandmother was Elise Leale née De Mouilpied this is Guernsey-French, this means “of marshy meadows” but our irreverent Dorey cousins said it meant ‘the wet feet’!!”
Except that it is De Mouilpied not Des Mouillespieds! The singular is striking: she, not of the wet feet but of the wet foot, as if she’d put one foot in and then thought better of it; or as if my grandmother had held her daughter aloft and then, in what might be called a reverse-Achilles, carefully lowered her into the water so as to dip her heel—and one heel only!—into the marshy Guernsey meadow.
The mood of the single wet foot is different from that of wet feet, a fact reflected in the tonal difference between dipping one’s toe in the water and getting one’s feet wet.1 The former is dainty, tentative, whereas the latter evokes a gameness and can-do attitude that elicits a preemptive fatigue in me. Paddling is more playful than getting one’s feet wet—and I prefer the Britishism’s associative link with dabbling and dappling, by contrast to the American “wading,” which sounds positively laborious.2 You wade through something, to get somewhere, whereas paddling is an activity in itself.
Whether singular or plural, the drenching of one’s nethermost regions is commonplace on Iona. You step jauntily onto an innocent-looking patch of grass only to find your foot sinking rapidly into bog. With any luck you recognize your misstep in time to spare your second foot from the same fate, but now you must trudge on unevenly, with one squelchy foot, which gradually becomes unpleasantly warm, swaddled in sodden sock.
Having water seep into your shoes—or, in an idiom preserved in the OED that I think should be revived—being “wetshod,” is not generally an experience one enters into on purpose. Although the only part I remember from Locke’s treatise on education is the recommendation that, when raising “a young gentleman,” one should “have his shoes made so, as to leak water.” Locke’s logic is that this innovation will enable the gentleman to reproduce the experience of the hardy poor, who go barefoot and, “by that means, come to be so reconciled by custom, to wet their feet, that they take no more cold or harm by it, than if they were wet in their hands.”
To the long list of innovations we attribute to Locke, then, we should also add, Crocs, c. 1690. 3
Notes
- See OED: Additional sense (2021)1. 1901–to dip (also put, stick, etc.) one’s toe in (the water) and variants: to try something new cautiously or gradually; to experiment tentatively.
P.7.f. 1924–to get one’s feet wet: to begin to participate in an activity; to gain initial experience. ↩︎ - See OED: wade, verb, 3c, 3.c. figurative. (Now chiefly, to go through a tedious task, a long or uninteresting book.) ↩︎
- When I tried to tell the younger about Locke’s idea while writing this post, she made it known that she was already well acquainted with his proposal, because I told her about it last time she found herself wetshod, which was, in fact, on Iona, when the duct tape holding her Chuck Taylors together finally gave out. ↩︎