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Two Left Feet

 

Two Left Feet



Meaning:

Two Left Feet means that you are clumsy or awkward. Especially with your feet, you might find yourself tripping or stumbling a lot. Quite often you hear I have two left feet when it comes to dancing, usually focused on a man who could not dance. 

“When it comes to dancing, I have two left feet.”


Origin:

This phrase focuses on the left side. The left side comes with a sense of being non-dominant causing awkwardness and a long time ago even being the evil side, there has been a long history of showing prejudice around the left side. -because really if you think about it, if you had two feet that were the same, whether they were left or right, you would be quite awkward.

Before two left feet came into the picture there was a phrase two left hands, that saying has been around since the early 1700s used to describe a high society person, usually a woman who seemed awkward.

Two left feet came into the picture in when  Pelham Grenville Wodehouse wrote the story “The Man with Two Left Feet” it was published in many magazines in the 1916s.

The first being in the USA in the Saturday Evening Post

Then in the UK in the 'The Strand Magazine', after that point it was published in a short stories book in  1917.

The text read:

‘Sure, Bill,’ she had said. She was a breezy old lady with a military moustache and an unconventional manner with her clientele. ‘You come to me an hour a day, and, if you haven’t two left feet, we’ll make you the pet of society in a month.’


Example:

Today we still used two left feet to describe a person, male or female, who is not good at dancing. We also use it to express being clumsy or uncoordinated. An example sentence is:

“I've always had two left feet, so I was nervous about our first dance after the wedding.”






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