Somehow I thought of “to step foot” as a recent distortion of the good old phrase “set foot.” But I just ran across it in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) — “if you stepped foot where they forbade you to go” — so I thought I’d check the OED (s.v. step, not updated since 1916). Imagine my surprise:
9. To move (the foot) forward or through a specified step. Chiefly with adverbs, as down, in, across. to step foot in (a place). Now only U.S.
1540 J. Palsgrave tr. G. Gnapheus Comedye of Acolastus v. v. sig. Aaivᵛ Steppe not one foote forth of this place.
a1547 Earl of Surrey Poems (1964) 22 Good ladies,..Stepp in your foote, come take a place, and mourne with me awhyle.
1702 H. Blackwell Eng. Fencing-master 51 Engage him in Carte, disingage in Tierce, stepping your Right-Foot a-cross at the same time.
1849 G. Cupples Green Hand (1856) xiii. 130 Stepping one of his long trowser-legs down from over the quarterdeck awning.
1864 R. B. Kimball Was he Successful? ii. i. 182 When Hiram stepped foot in the metropolis.
1880 S. G. W. Benjamin Troy i. iv. 26 (Funk) Calchas announced that the first man who stepped foot on the enemy’s soil was doomed at once to die.
Just goes to show how wrong you can be.
Now I think about it, the semantics are perfectly paralleled in footstep.
(BTW, I somehow always heard that song by The Police as “Walking in your food stamps”. I am like that.)
Interesting that it says only US. It feels like a familiar phrase to me, as if I’d known it all my life, but I’ve been in the US 35+ years now so it’s hard to know what’s originally UK and what I have acquired along the way.
Under the one foot, if you hold-take-touch with your hand, then you step how? (that is: if we are looking not for a verb for “foot”, but for a complement for “step”)
Under the other foot, Russian куда не ступала нога человека (translates “where no man has gone before” “untouched by human hands” and what not) was hardly borrowed from vernacular.
It is logical that it exists in English
If it’s specifically U. S. nowadays, then I suspect it may actually be regional, since it’s a usage that strikes me as distinctly weird. Obviously, I have encountered it, but it is certainly not part of my idiolect.
So it’s a 16th-century distortion of set foot, then. 🙂
I would have taken it for a simple error for “set foot.” Shows all I know.
“Step on” and “foot” share the same (underived) stem in Western Oti-Volta (respectively nao and naoore in Mooré.)
The situation is complicated in Agolle Kusaal by the fact that nɔbir “foot” (versus nɔ “stand on”) has introduced -b- from the plural nɔba (in contrast to Toende Kusaal nɔ’ɔt, plural nɔba) for reasons to do with somewhat obscure changes involve original root-final consonants before the plural ending -a. More research is needed …
“Step on” and “foot” share the same (underived) stem in Western Oti-Volta
The closest thing Russian has to a word for “foot” as opposed to “leg” also shares the same root as the word for “step on”.
On the other hand, Gurma and Eastern Oti-Volta (apart from Waama, which here as elsewhere mysteriously falls on the same side of an isogloss as WOV-Yom-Nawdm-Buli-Konni) have a root *tak-, presumably identical with the root of their verbs for “walk.”
This is an interesting root, as from an Oti-Volta-internal standpoint it looks like the obvious origin of the Oti-Volta word for “shoe, sandal”, seen in e.g. Kusaal ta’adir from *tagd-, with the “instrument” derivational suffix -d-.
What’s interesting about it is that what looks very much like the same word turns up in Songhay and even in Hausa:
https://lughat.blogspot.com/2017/10/shoes-in-songhay-and-west-chadic.html
On the one hand, it’s hard to believe that Oti-Volta would have borrowed the verb “walk” from Chadic or Songhay; on the other hand, it’s hard to believe that Oti-Volta language speakers were the local inventors of footwear (though the *tak-t- “shoe” etymon looks reconstructable to Proto-OV, and thus to a perfectly respectable three thousand years BP – at a guess.) Perhaps it’s all just coincidence after all.
You’re really not far wrong in thinking of “step foot” as recent. I’ve noticed it in the last couple of years as well. Both the Google ngram and the Corpus of Historical American English show “step* foot” as much rarer than “set* foot” until about the 1990s, and rising noticeably since then. (If you click through to the Google hits for “step foot” in the 1800s, most of them are false hits such as “step by step, foot by foot” or word lists such as “foot-step, foot-print”, but COHA is better curated and shows some real hits.)
The OED is mainly concerned with showing that something exists; showing how relatively common it’s been across time is much harder and usually beyond its scope. Also note, the a1547, 1702, and 1849 quotes don’t mean the same thing as “set foot in”, and I’ll bet they’ll be separated out when it’s revised.
Brett may well be right in suspecting that “step foot” was regional or otherwise non-standard until recently. In fact, most of the older COHA hits are in fictional dialogue, and often feel a bit rural. I think it’s indeed new *to the mainstream*, and that means anxiety and peeving. Sure enough, if you type “step foot” into Google, it suggests “step foot or set foot”, and that returns a fair amount of fretting since 2000 in the places you might expect, such as Grammarphobia, CJR, Barbara Wallraff’s Word Court (linked by Language Log for an early (2006) usage of “eggcorn”), Paul Brians’s Common Errors in English Usage, Stack Exchange, Quora.
But not everybody assumes rare=wrong. The American Heritage Dictionary has included “step v.tr. 1. To put or set (the foot) down: step foot on land.” in every edition all the way back to 1969 with no usage note.
Just noticed that Mbèlimè has nɔ̀ɔkɛ̀ for “foot” (the low root tone is the regular correspondence for the high root tone of the WOV “foot” words); but Mbèlimè also has tàadè “leg” (stem *taah, from *taak.)
I suppose that might reflect an original state of affairs, lost in the many OV languages that don’t by default distinguish leg/foot: after all “walker” = “leg” while “treader” = “foot” seems plausible enough on first principles.
So I shouldn’t have rushed to adduce this word as evidence for Waama grouping with the Western languages (but there are other pieces of evidence.)
You’re really not far wrong in thinking of “step foot” as recent. I’ve noticed it in the last couple of years as well. Both the Google ngram and the Corpus of Historical American English show “step* foot” as much rarer than “set* foot” until about the 1990s, and rising noticeably since then.
My Sprachgefühl is vindicated!
“The closest thing Russian has to a word for “foot” as opposed to “leg” also shares the same root as the word for “step on”.”
Same in Bulgarian.
it’s hard to believe that Oti-Volta would have borrowed the verb “walk” from Chadic or Songhay
Well, not that much:
käydä
Finnish
Etymology
From Proto-Finnic *käüdäk (compare Karelian käyvvä, Estonian käima), from earlier *käwe-, borrowed from Proto-Germanic *skēwijaną (compare Gothic 𐍃𐌺𐌴𐍅𐌾𐌰𐌽 (skēwjan), Old Norse skæva).
1. (intransitive, archaic) to walk
käyden
on foot (as an old synonym to jalan)
käypä
one who walks (archaic)
Synonym: kävellä
(18 senses in total)
@DE: It’s not unusual for words for specific kinds of walking to be loaned (e.g. English amble, perambulate, German spazieren(gehen) “take a walk”; flanieren “to stroll”) or to have slang forms for “walk” (e.g. German latschen). So I don’t think it’s so unlikely for a word meaning walking to be loaned, maybe with a specific narrowere meaning or as a slang term first, and then to become the normal word.
@juha, Hans:
True, true.
I think the likely time depth of Proto-OV makes loans from Songhay or Chadic improbable, but to be honest, I don’t suppose anybody really knows enough about how and where Songhay* or Chadic were, three thousand years ago, to be able to say.
It might be a case of Proto-Algonquian words for “whiskey”, I guess; but then you would have to multiply the improbabilities of the borrowing of the word for “walk” for each language where it’s happened, rather than it just being a once-off thing. Or perhaps it was just the fashionable word locally for a bit …
On balance, I incline to the “sheer coincidence” explanation, I think.
I mean, *tak is not a very improbable syllable. There are probably lots of languages with a word that means “walk” that looks like that …
* On some theories, there wasn’t any Songhay to “be” anywhere, three thousand years ago.
There’s also the fact that it’s not only “walk” that’s involved, but also the ordinary word for “leg” (though, after all, I am typing these words in a language which has borrowed the ordinary word for “leg” …)
a language which has borrowed the ordinary word for “leg”
Some do it with ‘neck’:
kakla
Proto-Finnic
Etymology
Borrowed from Baltic (compare Lithuanian kaklas), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷékʷlos, replacing inherited *sepä (from Proto-Uralic *śepä) in this meaning. Doublet with *kekrä, possibly more distantly also with *kulkedak.
Noun
*kakla
1. neck
Descendants
Estonian: kael
Finnish: kaula
Ingrian: kagla
Karelian: (Northern) kakla, (Southern) kagla
Livonian: kaggõl
Livvi: kaglu
Ludian: kagl
Veps: kagl
Võro: kaal
Votic: kagla