Little cat feet.

Dear Word Detective: So, I’m shoe shopping online and find a nice pair of “sneakers” I want to purchase. All of a sudden I realize that I have no idea why I should need shoes for sneaking. Walking, jogging, frolicking — yes. Sneaking…er, not so much. Does the name “sneakers” have anything to do with sneaking, or perhaps they’re called sneakers as a joke because the rubber soles tend to make noise. Who knows? Well, hopefully you do. — Clandestine Chris.

Yes, I do. But first, a word about online shoe shopping. A few years ago I would have said that shopping for shoes online was silly, since you can’t exactly try them on by holding your feet up to the screen. Then I took a chance and ordered a pair of “Brown Bear” chukka boots from L.L. Bean. I loved those shoes, and wore them every day. But they finally became sufficiently ratty that I went online to order another pair. Oh noes!, as they say on the internet. Bean had discontinued the best shoes in the whole world! So what I want you all to do is go to the L.L Bean website, right now, and tell them to bring back my shoes. Seriously. I’ll wait here.

Thanks. You guys are the best. Now, to begin at the beginning, the word “sneak” is very old, and our modern form is a descendant of the Old English “snican,” meaning “to desire, reach for,” which became the Middle English “sniken,” meaning “to creep or crawl.” It’s worth noting that the root of that Old English “snican” also gave us “snake.”

“Sneak” as a verb in modern English has a wide variety of senses, but they all involve some aspect of stealth and/or deception. The earliest sense to appear, in the late 16th century, was “to move or walk in a stealthy or slinking manner, as if ashamed or afraid to be seen.” Not surprisingly, a person who behaved is such a manner was, by around 1643, known as a “sneak.”

Fast-forward now to the 19th century, and the neighborhood “sneak” had a new advantage — shoes with soft gum-rubber soles in place of the usual leather, an innovation that made the footsteps of the wearer nearly noiseless. Such shoes, worn for athletic activities as well as in situations where quiet was important, came to be known as “sneaks” by about 1862 (”The night-officer is generally accustomed to wear a species of India-rubber shoes or galoshes on her feet. These are termed ’sneaks’ by the women [of Brixton Prison]“). By the end of the century, the term “sneaker” was more common.

The use of “sneak” and “sneaker” for such shoes was a bit jocular, since most wearers had no nefarious motives or even a need for stealth. But another name for the same sort of footwear — “gumshoe” — was, by about 1908, adopted as underworld slang for a police detective who did rely on stealth and secrecy to apprehend evildoers.

Today, now that athletic shoes are a multi-billion dollar industry, the humble term “sneaker” seems to be largely in eclipse, replaced by such specific category terms as “running shoe” or “cross-trainer.” In Britain, athletic shoes in general are known as “trainers.”

Glub glub club.

Dear Word Detective: The word “swimmingly” means, idiomatically, “with great ease and success.” Where does this definition come from? Is swimming supposed to be the epitome of ease? I can imagine plenty of people have trouble swimming. I bet they would be offended if you used the word “swimmingly” to mean “with great ease and success.” In the event that this unintentional insult occurs, I’d like to be able to tell them the history of the word. — Caroline.

Hey, I’ll make you a deal. If you run into someone who is visibly offended by use of the adverb “swimmingly” because they, personally, cannot swim, send them to me and we’ll have a chat. While there were, obviously, some idioms popular in years past that are rightly regarded as offensive today, I think that a non-swimmer taking offense at “swimmingly” would be simply silly. I can’t play poker worth beans, but I’m not about to bridle at being told to “put your cards on the table” or “go for broke.”

Given that most of our planet’s surface is covered with water, it’s not surprising that “swim” itself is a very old word. The Old English “swimman,” meaning ‘to move on or in water, to float,” was derived from a Germanic root that also produced the words for “swim” in several other European languages.

Since movement through water is generally smooth (unless one is thrashing about in panic), especially compared to the “clomp clomp clomp” of walking on land, “swim” has acquired a wide variety of figurative uses, many involving a sense of gliding or moving smoothly as if suspended in liquid (”She … swam across the floor as though she scorned the drudgery of walking,” 1888).

This use of “swim” to mean “glide smoothly with little apparent effort” gave us the adverb “swimmingly” in the early 17th century meaning “with smooth, uninterrupted progress; easily; with complete success” (”The interview went off very swimmingly,” 1824).

Strictly from hunger.

Dear Word Detective: I was reading a 1988 article about the movie “The Manchurian Candidate” in the Washington Post, and came across this: “Back then those two boys — Frankenheimer and Axelrod — had wrinkles in their bellies and worked and turned out this marvelous picture.” It’s a quote from Richard Condon, the author of the book that was made into the movie. I just assume that the statement implies the two had been bent over, working very hard, and thus wrinkles formed on their front sides. I’ve never heard this expression before and wondered about its origin. I had little to no luck finding anything about it anywhere. — Becky de Wit.

Thanks for a very interesting question. By the way, but was there any special reason you were reading that review in an election year? Some little bit of insight you’d like to share with us? Not that I care, personally. I’ll just vote for Harold Stassen like I always do.

“The Manchurian Candidate” is a great movie, at least the original 1962 version written by George Axelrod, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey. The 2004 remake with Denzel Washington was, in my opinion, a bad idea.

I’m not surprised that you had no luck tracking down “wrinkles in their bellies.” It’s a fairly obscure figure of speech today, although it was once more well-known, at least among certain sectors of society. “To have wrinkles in your belly” was slang, probably originally among hobos, for being very hungry, specifically to be chronically underfed and thus emaciated. In the context of the quotation you cite, Condon probably meant that Axelrod and Frankenheimer were “hungry young men” full of eagerness and energy to do a good job (as opposed to overfed studio hacks). The phrase is also used in a more general sense to mean “in need of money.”

It’s difficult to date “wrinkles in one’s belly” because most compilations of slang seem to overlook the phrase. A short form of it is included in an article entitled “The Vocabulary of Bums,” published in the journal American Speech in 1929 (”Wrinkles: creases in the stomach caused by postponing too many meals”), and it crops up in a 1945 quote from famed band leader Tommy Dorsey in a biography published in 2005. Speaking to a band member who had quit the band, Dorsey said, “Got enough wrinkles in your belly? Are you ready to come back?” A positive form of the phrase (”to get the wrinkles out of your belly”) is defined in Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of the Underworld as “settling down to prison life,” apparently because a stretch in the slammer meant regular meals, a novelty to many new inmates. My guess is that the phrase dates to the early 20th century, although it may be much older. Hunger among poor people is, of course, hardly a new phenomenon.