We’ve had a lot of rain this year and while I’m not usually out much in it, it brought to mind something my mother always told me as a kid when I went out in the rain — “put on your galoshes.” That’s one of those words you don’t hear much anymore. I think we usually told our kids to put on their boots when it was raining out. I’ve also heard things you wear on your feet when its raining referred to as rubbers, gumshoes, overshoes and dickersons and in England I know they’re called Wellington boots or just “wellys.” So these things you slip over your shoes to keep them from getting wet or muddy go by a number of names. As I said, I rarely hear the term galoshes used anymore, and maybe rightfully so. I’ve learned that technically, galoshes and rain boots aren’t the same and the names shouldn’t be used interchangeably. Rain boots are intended to protect the feet and lower leg, while galoshes are more about protecting shoes.
We get the word from French (galoche) and Latin that picked it up from Greek and it originally meant a shoemaker’s last — literally “wood” + “foot.” By the 14th century, the term was used to describe English style clogs — those with a wooden sole, and fabric or leather “uppers.” Later, the term also applied to an overshoe with a shaped wood base to raise the wearer’s good shoes off the ground.
The credit for the transition from a traditionally wooden sole to one of vulcanized rubber goes to Charles Goodyear with some assistance from Leverett Candee. The vulcanization of rubber gave it properties that made it easily molded, durable, and tough. A rubberized elastic webbing made galoshes produced in the 1890s by Goodyear easy to pull on and off.
So the galoshes as I know (or knew) them became popular in the late 19th century. I remember the galoshes that I had when I was a kid being about ankle-high rubber boots that were supposed to, but almost never did, fit over my shoes and they had fasteners that were hard to fasten and would often pinch your fingers when closing or opening them. I’ve seen pictures of galoshes with zippers, but when I was a kid, mine all had those nasty little fasteners. It’s too bad, but our grandkids will never remember being told to “put on your galoshes”…….
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