[ol]
[li]What makes a shoe a gum shoe?[/li][li]How did it get to be a synonym for detective?[/li][/ol]
Greeting to Opal are assumed.
Gum shoes had soft soles, unlike the standard men’s dress show which had a very hard sole and clicked audibly on hard surfaces.
Gummo Marx, the forgotten older brother who was in the vaudeville act until about WWI was nicknamed that because he always wore gum shoes, although it’s uncertain whether that referred to this kind of soft-soled shoes or galoshes, which had the same nickname.
And of course the “gum” being referred to originally meant gum rubber, mostly from a rubber tree.
Gum shoes were originally galoshes made of gum rubber. Back at least to 1850.
Soft sole shoes, with gum rubber soles, were quieter as others have said.
The term first gets used to refer to detectives around 1900.
And, to show you how far back the connotation of soft soled shoes(sneakers) go–
Here in Australia, and over in New Zealand, what Brits call Wellington boots are universally known as gumboots. Same word-root, I’d expect.
Just to make the definitive connection that others have alluded to but not explicitly stated…Gum shoes… sneakers… they are quiet, so you can “sneak up” on someone, or sneak about and listen in undetected. Hence, appropriate for a detective.
I always thought it was due to the fact detectives did a lot of walking place to place looking for clues, (foot work/legwork) the more walking on sidewalks, etc., the more gum would stick to the bottom of the shoe “gum on show”, = gumshoe?
Not a chance.
Oops. I just noticed that you’re new here. Let me explain then that explanations like yours are called “folk etymology.” People who know nothing about the origins of words and terms try to come up with some kind of story to make sense out of it. These stories are always wrong, and usually violate everything we know about word coinages, which is plenty. We have some real experts on this board, and samclem is one of them.
If you’re uncertain about a term a good place to start is etymonline.com.
I still refer to my athletic shoes (New Balance, etc.) as sneaks. Of course I also refer to my eyeglasses as “specs”.
Interestingly, a Google search on “sneaks” doesn’t bring up any shoe references on the first page; however a Google image search on sneaks results in an entire page of athletic shoes.
Doing a lot of walking would be another reason for a detective to wear soft-soled shoes, though, as they’d probably be more comfortable for that.
To be precise, it’s not “folk etymology,” which is a specific term referring to how words from other languages morph to match English terms. “Isinglass” is one example, as is “turtle,” which originally a bird (e.g. “turtle dove”); the French “toutue” was changed to match the English word.
To be precise, Exapno got it correct. In the etymological world, folk etymology is defined as