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What the heck are sand shoes?

Haggis and tatties said:
Up here in sunny Glasgow we called them sannies.
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When I was at school in the 70s/80s (round Bannockburn way) actual sandshoes were sannies, and gutties was what we called shoes for PE/gym class generally... So all sannies were gutties, but not all gutties were sannies...

Or more accurately we called them gu''ies, with a double glottal stop, cos... y'know... Scotland.
 
I'd never heard the term before either, "Trainers" seems like the more typically British thing to have said (I assume just going "Converse" would have been out of bounds for product placement reasons), but presumably Moff wanted something that matched the two word rhythm of "Dickie Bow".
 
I'm 30, lived in Britain all my life, and too had never heard the term "sand shoes" before that episode.
 
I enjoy word histories/origins and phrases and regional dialects and accents, so it wasn't too long after I watched 'Day of the Doctor' a few times that I needed to Google sand shoes. Food references, too. Had to Google 'Jammie Dodgers'. "And Bob's your uncle!" Unless there's "Trouble at t'mill"........
 
Lonemagpie said:
Haggis and tatties said:
Up here in sunny Glasgow we called them sannies.
Click to expand...

When I was at school in the 70s/80s (round Bannockburn way) actual sandshoes were sannies, and gutties was what we called shoes for PE/gym class generally... So all sannies were gutties, but not all gutties were sannies...

Or more accurately we called them gu''ies, with a double glottal stop, cos... y'know... Scotland.
Click to expand...

Never heard of gutties, sannies seems to have covered all soft footwear that i remember, apart from baseball boots, i remember anybody who had a pair of them were from a rich family. lol Of course i was running about in the summer with cut down wellies, no fancy sannies for me. lol
 
Here are all the times, that I can remember, the term sand shoes was used in Day Of The Doctor.

#11(sarcastically): I'm the doctor and I'm all cool. Oops! I'm wearing sand shoes.

#11: I demand to be incarcerated in the Tower immediately with my co-conspirators, sand shoes and granddad.
War Doctor: "Granddad"?!
#10: They're not sand shoes.
War Doctor: Yes they are.

War Doctor (or as I call him, the real #9): If you really are me, with your sand shoes and your dickie-bow, and that screwdriver is still mine, that calculation is still going on.
 
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RoJoHen said:
I really appreciated this in "Torchwood: Miracle Day" when Esther and Gwen have several exchanges about the differences in vocabulary. I thought that was handled in a particularly clever way, like when Mehki Pfifer is changing his "pants" in the backseat of the car, and Gwen flips out because she thinks he's taking off his underwear.
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I've never heard that before - most reviews of Miracle Day hated that element of the script.



DaveJames said:
Ha, now that I see what they look like, I can definitely understand why Eleven thought it was so funny.

Just too bad Eleven didn't still have his tweed professor costume, because Ten could have had a field day making fun of that thing.
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I'm surprised the prison scene didn't have any dirty jokes about "it doesn't work on wood"!
 
Can't believe people in the UK don't know Sandshoes/sannies. Guess it's a northern thing. Was always sannies for PE as a kid. No trainers allowed has to be sandshoes for the hall.
 
By the way: sandshoes, as Bob said. One word. Always has been. It's an Australian thing too.
 
Sandshoes, sneakers, runners, joggers.

Oh, and it's not a "Flashlight". It's a "Torch".
 
TommyR01D said:
RoJoHen said:
I really appreciated this in "Torchwood: Miracle Day" when Esther and Gwen have several exchanges about the differences in vocabulary. I thought that was handled in a particularly clever way, like when Mehki Pfifer is changing his "pants" in the backseat of the car, and Gwen flips out because she thinks he's taking off his underwear.
Click to expand...

I've never heard that before - most reviews of Miracle Day hated that element of the script.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it fell flat because we get more than enough American TV and films over here that any Brit is more than capable of talking to an American without getting all confused, we know what pants are and to say sidewalk instead of pavement and so on. Gwen has either never seen a film in her life or is deliberately being a dick.

The only Americanism I can think of that really causes any humour/confussion is "Fanny", and that's because it's a phrase that, perhaps thankfully, doesn't seem to crop up a lot in Yank TV so on the infrequent occasions it does it's a bit of a mind fuck (I still distinctly remember watching the TV version of The Stand as a kid with my whole family and everyone finding the "My fanny is all sore" line deeply awkward because none of us had heard it used in the "Bum" sense before).
 
Oh, there's plenty of English slang that gets past American censors as they don't realise it's rude.
And that's before we get into the cases of invented stuff: maybe "Naff off" did exist before it was 'invented' as an acceptable swearword for use in the prison sitcom Porridge, but it's Porridge that made it an actual bit of the regular UK language...

On topic: they were always called plimsoles at my school. But I was down south. Don't remember granddad calling them sandshoes though, but he left school in 1921 so...
 
I still remember the giggles at school when Phil Collins called someone a twat in Miami Vice!
 
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