Meaning & Analysis
To know someone's foot size, as a shoemaker would, implying familiarity with the exact measure needed to fit them properly.
Insights
Personal Insight
This proverb figuratively refers to understanding someone deeply—their temperament, desires, or weaknesses—so as to handle, manipulate, or please them precisely.
Manipulative Advantage
To 'have the length of one’s foot' implies strategic knowledge about someone, allowing the speaker to influence or outwit them with calculated precision.
Psychological Matching
The phrase also reflects emotional or social harmony—being well-attuned to another person, knowing how to respond or behave in ways that align exactly with their preferences.
Language of Shoemaking and Social Dexterity
Originating in the world of tailoring and shoemaking, where precision was critical, the proverb turns material measurement into metaphor for psychological acumen—knowing someone's 'fit' becomes a metaphor for savvy interpersonal awareness.
Gender and Seduction Subtext
In many historical uses, especially in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the phrase carried a sexual or romantic connotation. To know a woman’s 'foot' often implied intimate familiarity, flirting with euphemism and double entendre.
Early Modern Pragmatism
The proverb’s popularity in Renaissance literature reflects a cultural admiration for wit, manipulation, and the strategic handling of people—knowing someone’s 'measure' was akin to knowing how to 'play the game' of courtship, business, or politics.
Rhetorical Devices
Metaphor
The act of measuring a foot is a metaphor for gauging character, emotions, or preferences—elevating a mundane task to a tool of social navigation.
Double Entendre
Especially in Renaissance usage, the phrase often hints at romantic or erotic familiarity, making it a favored idiom in witty or bawdy contexts.
Synecdoche
The 'foot' stands in for the whole person—especially their psychological or emotional profile—typical of folk phrases that reduce the person to a symbolic body part.
Transcription
Quotations
But you shal not know the length of my foote, vntill by your cunning you get commendation.
Who by the last nights prattle had found the length of Penelopes foote.
He can tak the meat of your foot.
Finding the length of his foot.
If any maide brought but her shoes to mending, his wife swore presently that hee had the length of her foote.
I know the length of his foot.
And misery taking the length of my foot, it boots not me to sue for life.
For he will soone haue the length of your foote to an haire.
Well, gossip, I know too the length of your foot.
He knows how to handle him.—has the length of his foot.
You have the Measure of his Foot.
Shakespeare Citations
Do not you know my lady’s foot by th’ squier?
Annotations
- That is, you can exactly humour him.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.