Sunday, January 8, 2012

Winklepickers

I suppose I left a few of you wondering what on earth a winklepicker was after yesterdays blog,but in the interest of keeping the length of the daily blog from becoming tedious I decided it was best to leave you hanging until today.
Winklepickers (aka winkle pickers) are a style of shoe or boot worn from the 1950's onward by male and female British rock and roll fans. The feature which gives the boots or shoes their name is the very sharp and quite long pointed toe. The pointed toe was called the winklepicker toe because in England periwinkle snails or winkles are or were a popular seaside snack,which is eaten using a pin or other pointed object to carefully extract the soft parts out of the coiled shell,hence the phase:"to winkle something out",from that came the humorous name for shoes with a very pointed tip.
I figured this would also apply to what we referred to as Beatles Boots in the 60's,but they were not considered winklepickers.

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