This summer, I read an article about a glass over shoe that the article suggested might have been the inspiration to the story of Cinderella. It was of the style that looks like a slipper on a pedastal between one and two feet tall. I believe the article speculated that the shoe belonged to a Medici. I can find no trace on google now. Does anyone else recall this or have information about it? I would welcome any suggestions on to how to find more about it.
I read somewhere (sorry, no cite) that the early versions of the story had fur slippers, not glass. The Medici slipper may have inspired the glass version, if the Medici slipper was well known at the time.
The Master speaks (1st Footnote after the article)
Snopes claims that the glass slipper thing was a case of learned people thinking that they knew the non-obvious answer while the original one was correct the whole time. Cinderella’s slippers were made of glass per the debunking of the debunking.
Glass today is common item. Back then it was like saying her shoes were carved from diamonds.
The article had a photograph of the shoe. The glass shoe looked like a glass version of the leftmost shoe in thisillustration . The article stated that it was stong enough to be used as a shoe. The people who had found it were quite surprised at the find. The article also went into the mistranslation theory of it was really a fur and not a glass slipper and discussed how very unlikely that was due to the exact words being used. Has anyone seen this article besides me or heard of this shoe?
Oooh! Oooh! Oooh! A perfect chance for me to propagate the term I made up for that very phenomenon in posts 19 and 20 of this thread!!
An incorrect, pseudo-erudite etymological derivation that falsely calls the correct derivation a “folk etymology” is (henceforth) known as a “pedant etymology” (or “pedantic etymology”, if you like that better).
This neologism is freely available and non-copyrightable. Void where prohibited. 
I prefer the term “wrong” personally
Sure it’s wrong, but it’s a very specific kind of wrong with its own particular characteristics.
I think the poetic justice of condemning a simple derivation as “folk etymology”, while preferring a more obscure and “erudite” derivation that is actually completely false, is so delightful that the phenomenon really deserves its own technical term.
Am I the only one who finds Snopes’ rebuttal of the vair/verre thing completely unconvincing? If “vair” was no longer in current use at the time of Perrault’s writing, that would make the mistake more plausible, not less. And the fact that glass slippers are peculiar to the French version, as Snopes claims, also lends credence to the mis-transcription explanation, since the pun would not exist in other languages. Finally, there’s the fact that, if the oral tradition extended back to a time when “vair” was in current usage, anyone hearing the story would have assumed the “fur” meaning, even if that wasn’t the original intent.
Mind, I’m not saying that “vair” was definitely the original, but I see no reason to assume otherwise.
As I recall the article I read had a similar argument, but it seemed more convincing to me. I never liked the fur argument because it simply falls apart in the trying on stage. Fur slippers would have some give, glass has none. I know many women who can make a good show of trying on and even wearing leather shoes quite a bit too small. It doesn’t seem credible that the step-sisters would chop up their feet to shove them in a leather/fur slipper when there was a chance the shoes would stretch. The thought of unforgiving, clear glass though, makes it seem more likely. It is certainly a better story.
I really would like to find out more about this and I am having no luck. I read a wide variety of news and science news sources, so that makes it more difficult to pinpoint the original place I read it.
Vair specifically means squirrel fur in its sole modern use, in heraldry, and it’s my impression that that specificity dates back to when it was in common use. (Cf. ermine, the other “heraldic fur.”) Since it would require numerous squirrel pelts to produce most garments, it was considered a rare and costly fur. (Granted squirrels are fairly common animals, getting enough squirrel pelts to make a vair coat or stole would make such garments expensive.)
Hence slippers of squirrel fur would be a luxury, and appropriate for the fairy-godmother apparelling of Cinderella.
(You may make a carbon copy of this post if you like, provided you agree not to grump about folk or pedantic etymological foibles. ;))