goody two-shoes
A goody two-shoes is a prudish or morally upright person. It’s an odd term to the modern ear. What do shoes have to do with being good?
The term comes from the title character in the 1765 The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes:
The Pleasure she took in her two Shoes...by that Means obtained the Name of Goody Two-Shoes.
The goody in the name has nothing to do with being good. Rather, it’s an abbreviated form of goodwife, the mistress of a house, the equivalent of the modern Mrs. Later readers, unfamiliar with that form of address, took it to mean pious or virtuous.
The slang usage is 20th century. From the Los Angeles Times, 30 May 1924, in a description of a boxing match:
The two showed much brotherly affection in the first and second round thereby bringing a Kansas tornado of yips and catcalls from the angered fans. Hollywood bugs brook no Goody-Two-Shoes bouts.
(Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition; Historical Dictionary of American Slang)
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Copyright 1997-2007, by David Wilton
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> What do shoes have to do with being good?
The answer is “a lot” if you mean the sound of “two shoes” in Yiddish or Hebrew. The word T’SHooVah means “repentance, atonement” in both Hebrew and Yiddish and means “return to God” in Talmudic Hebrew.
“The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes” may have been written by Oliver Goldsmith. According to Wikipedia, Goldsmith earned his BA in 1749 at Trinity College, Dublin, studying theology and law. Both his father and his mother’s father were clergymen.
It seems that the author of “Two Shoes”, whoever it was, did know the Hebrew/Yiddish term for repentance. See Strong’s number 07725 SHooV.
Israel “izzy” Cohen