Put in Another’s Shoes.

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Possibly all this talking about packing for a trip has put me into some kind of shoe funk so I absolutely must not forget mom’s advice to pack my shoes in plastic bags so the rest of the contents of the suitcase don’t start smelling like two day old roadkill. Change that from two day old roadkill to ShoeGoo®… I am still trying to remove some paint and glue soles back on with ShoeGoo® as a fallback position.

Google put me in an unusual place. It was not where I was going yesterday but I figure it might be worth a short commitment today since I am still working over my shoe issues. The place that Google recommended on a search for “shoe Thesaurus” (since it gets kind of boring reading the word shoe two or thee times in one sentence) was Thesaurus.com’s thoughts on “put in anothers shoes”. See what I mean? This was the second recommended result and incorrectly punctuated at that.

Before I even checked for the synonyms or clicked the link I immediately thought empathy and how much I felt this emotion over the years. As I started to check what WAS recommended I saw that empathize was all the way up there in the third slot. Ally and associate preceded it as recommended synonyms. No way! I thought. I also thought it quite peculiar that one synonym for the incorrect no possessive form was “put oneself in another's shoes”. Obviously, adding oneself moves this interchangeable meaning down to number six on list of possible substitutions and correctly identifies the phrase as possessive. How odd.

I then clicked the link to ally to find all of the possible words and phrases that could be used in its place and was astounded not to find a single one referring to put in another’s shoes. When checking associate I also could find not a single instance of yellow or blue blocked text for a search for shoes on that page. Apparently, it is much more popular substituting these two words for the phrase than going back the other way.

Bingo. When I checked empathize there were three references in Thesaurus.com to someone else’s shoes. To me that sounds like a synonym. When I skipped through the original recommendations I saw that sympathize was lower on the list than empathize and unlike previous proofs had only one reference to wearing someone else’s footwear.

I began to wonder if I truly knew the difference between empathize and sympathize and started to feel sorry for myself for ever going down this road in the first place. I decided to leave Thesaurus.com behind and move on to Freedictionary.com for the definitive answer. I have found that website to be especially helpful in finding what things mean or good synonyms for things like shoes.

First I entered shoe in the search box and found a wealth of English idioms containing the word. I opened a second tab in Freedictionary.com and went to sympathize and changed the shoe tab to empathize. The first rule of defining a word was broken on ‘empathize’ with:

em•pa•thize ( m p -th z )
intr.v. em•pa•thized, em•pa•thiz•ing, em•pa•thiz•es
To feel or experience empathy: empathized with the striking miners.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved… Was credited with this lousy job of a define FAIL.

Sympathize was redirected to sympathy and this showed up:
extend one's sympathy (to someone) to express sympathy to someone.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs. © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc… Was credited with this lousy job of a define FAIL.

I am way too lazy to pull out the night stand that is in front of the bookcase where the HUGE unabridged dictionary is stored and find the dolly to load it on to take to my recliner for review. I hit the interwebs again. I started typing in my trusty Google searchbox sympathiz and before I could enter the e Google had the common sense to know precisely what I was looking for and offered with a deft left click the option sympathize vs empathize - About 295,000 results (0.19 seconds). As usual I was amazed.

It was looking like many of the 295,000 results were where someone asked some forum somewhere... then some ‘Expert’ weighed in on the matter. I would rather have asked my sister the high school English teacher because at least I knew how expert she was and that my mother’s good grammar genes were at least part of her constitution if not mine.

I dove in anyway and looked for the most authoritative description of the link for help. I decided to avoid Wiki, Answers.com, answers.Yahoo.com and any others where all you needed to be was breathing to voice an opinion. I chose Google’s first choice hoping they would do a little better than Thesaurus.com: Grammar Mishaps: Sympathy vs. Empathy I recently received a hub request to write an article on the difference between sympathy and empathy. Receiving my undergrad in Psychology, I had my own ... hubpages.com/hub/Sympathy_vs_Empathy - http://hubpages.com/hub/Sympathy_vs_Empathy

Apparently Robin, the author of what appears to be an income producing blog had obtained her undergraduate degree in Psychology just like me. I knew I should have stopped when I realized I was getting grammar advice from a graduate who messed with white rats and Skinner Boxes… how does that possibly qualify anyone as an expert on these matters? At least she appears to have already completed more research on the topic than I am willing to do. Her link is shown above if you are just that curious or want to help Robin net a nickel for your visit. My very brief summary of what I suspected follows and is made up of two quotes from Merriam-Webster that Robin was kind enough to type so I won’t have to.

Merriam-Webster definition of sympathy: the act or capacity of entering into or sharing the feelings or interests of another b : the feeling or mental state brought about by such sensitivity

Merriam-Webster's definition of empathy: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner

I take this as sympathy – I feel like you do or feel sorry for you. Empathy would be: Been there, done that so I think I understand how I think you must feel.

I am empathizing with myself right now and sympathizing at the same time. This is exactly where I have been so many times before… in Another’s Shoes. If I don’t find the right two pair to pack I may end up exactly that way. I won’t have to worry who my allies are or about removing my or somebody else's shoes for the preflight bomb inspection. Or, what airport the second pair has been sent to after it has been checked but decided on its own destination.

May as well go put on another few pairs of shoes and see if I can break the record still standing at two and a half hours…That or start scraping paint again. 

© 08.16.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg