Guys in the trades, carpenters, plumbers, masons, will often say “What shoemaker did this?”. Meaning the work was done very incompetently. Often jury rigged crap by someone with no training in the trades.
How did the age old craft of shoe making become an insult?
“Cobbler” sometimes gets used as an insult in 16th- and 17th-century texts, although people in those days would have made a distinction between a “shoemaker” and a “cobbler” (who mends shoes rather than makes them, hence the associations with cheap, shoddy, patched-up work). So, for example, in this exchange from Julius Caesar, the Second Commoner is playing with the two senses of “cobbler,” which is why Flavius and Marullus keep asking him what his job is after he’s just told them – they don’t realize that he is literally a cobbler.
Maybe, as “shoemaker” and “cobbler” became virtual synonyms, the former took on the connotations of the latter?
New York. John DeSilvia was a NY union carpenter and contractor. He’s got a show Rescue My Renovation on DIY. The show focuses on homeowners with botched renovations and stubborn leaks other guys never could fix. He uses shoemaker a lot. Can’t cuss on DIY.
I imagine different regions have their own expressions for incompetent people doing crap work.
The word cobble can either mean rough/clumsy manufacture or to patch/repair an item. So you’re not really dealing with quality items either way. Likewise, a cobbler is not necessarily someone who makes shoes, but who mends them.
So I could definitely see the idea of lousy patches or shoddy work being cobbled together, leading to cobbler, leading to shoe maker.
On the other hand, I’ve never heard guys in the trade use that term.
IN my experience, ‘cobbling something together’ was more about making the best of what was available than doing a shoddy job (shoddy is also interesting word).
‘Bodger’ would be my word of choice for incompetent work.
Having worked as an actual cobbler, let me just say that while there are some actual artisans in the trade there are also a lot of folks who deserve the insult.
Likewise, “tinker” used to refer itinerant metalworkers/tinsmiths who would travel about mending metal items, which definitely served and important role in the pre-modern economy but “tinkering” is not usually used as a term of respect.
Partly, mending never seems to get the same respect as originally crafting something however important repairs might be, or however well done.
In that case, if you start out, instinctively, saying sh—, switching to shoemaker might let you keep your PG rating. Most of the suggestions given sound plausible to me, but plausible doesn’t prove etymologies.
(Now I keep hearing a TV carpenter saying “sh—un the infidel.” I need a better earworm.)
