May 4, 2001

shoestring

Here's an old expression that means something like living 'hand to mouth' or 'from payday to payday'. Operating on a shoestring may refer to a business that has no excess cash. For individual finances it seems to mean precariously close to bankruptcy. Apart from the analogy that a shoestring may be thin and fragile, how did this term come into use and does it have other meanings?

Indeed, anything done on a shoestring is done with barely adequate financial resources. The expression immediately makes us think, as you did, of businesses "started on a shoestring through hard work, perseverance and the hope that someone wants what you're selling" (Washington Post, 2001) or "artists struggling to survive on a shoestring" (Toronto Star, 1986).

Where the image of shoestring as representing a pitifully small amount of money came from is hard to determine. Christine Ammer, in The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, mentions (and dismisses) what she calls "a fanciful theory" involving debtors in British prisons who supposedly lowered a shoe to ground level from a window on tied-together shoelaces, hoping to solicit contributions of money from the occasional passerby. We agree. This appears to be yet another example of creative, picturesque, but utterly groundless etymologizing.

Your speculation about the "thin and fragile" nature of shoestrings is probably closer to the mark. (My own experience is that they break at the worst possible moments.) Ammer likens the slender shoelace to "slender resources"--the very image alluded to in this quote from yesterday's issue of Newsday: "American Scholar's editor, Anne Fadiman, called her quarterly's budget 'a piece of dental floss' compared to the 'shoestring' budget of the Washington Monthly...." Robert Hendrickson's QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins draws similar conclusions--suggesting that "one's resources are limited to the laces of one's shoes." The question remains: why the shoestring? Why did that particular object emerge as a symbol of impoverishment?

There is no sure answer, but we can find hints of a precursory concept in American writings from the latter half of the 19th century. The leftover shoestring, saved when the other one broke, was then a household item commonly used for such tasks as tying up small bundles. And even if it had not yet become a universal symbol, writers found it a useful illustration of things of real but slight value. In a fictional piece in The Atlantic Monthly, for example, one character says of another, "If, now, I had in my possession even an old shoestring that had ever been his, I would beg you to return it to him, and find out for me where I can go never to see him" (July, 1859). The lowliness of the shoestring is highlighted in an article about the education of the blind written in 1887: "Those who have all their lives been in the habit of depending upon sight for everything, from the study of philosophy and the Scriptures to the tying of a shoestring, cannot seem to understand that hearing and touch may with practice be made to serve nearly all purposes about as well, and some very much better" (The Century).

Whatever led to it, the specific association of shoestring with lack of funds has been around since the early 1890s, when references to shoestring gamblers, those who gambled for very small stakes, were first recorded. The OED cites the full expression in 1904: " He...speculated ‘on a shoe-string'--an exceedingly slim margin" (Cosmopolitan), and the expression has had staying power. However, these days, on a shoestring and shoestring as an adjective can also be somewhat playful and casual. Recent references include "globetrotting on a shoestring," "20-somethings on shoestring budgets," and advertisements for "Adventures on a Shoestring." In these contexts, the sense of shoestring has apparently ameliorated; we're no longer talking abject poverty, here. You can now choose a shoestring, or low-budget, activity on Friday and pamper yourself on the weekend.

Enid