Meaning:
Embark on a journey or task with purpose and gusto.
Background:
This phrase is first recorded in the second edition of Sir Thomas Overbury's
poem A Wife, circa 1613:
"Hee is still setting the best foot forward."
The Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings dates "Always put
your best foot forward" to 1495, but provides no supporting evidence for
that.
`Put your best foot forward' is rather an odd saying for us to use as it
implies three or more feet. When I was at university studying maths, a
lecturer worked out the answer to a student's question as `two quarters'. He
then corrected himself and said "we have a special name for that". Likewise,
`the best' is the name we give for something that surpasses all others.
Something that surpasses one other is specifically called `the better', as in
one's wife being called `one's better half'. You need more than two legs to
put your best foot forward.
In the years before 2014, when he was convicted of sexual assault on four
underage girls, the Australian entertainer Rolf Harris made regular
appearences on BBC television. On of his routines was as Jeg the Peg, a
three-legged man.
Cows, and Rolf Harris, may be able to put their best foot forward but `better
foot forward' makes more sense for humans.
Shakespeare, not usually a stickler for linguistic exactitude, used a
`proper' form of the expression in King John, 1595 :
"Nay, but make haste; the better foot before."
- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]
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I went to see the doctor, 10 years after regaining my (general) health, for
fungal toenails. One glance convinced him that they were beyond topical
treatment. He knew a sure-fire fungicide, however, that worked from within. I
were to take a pill everyday for six months but first, he said, I needed a
trivial blood test, to see if my liver was healthy enough.
I have since ghosted him in the hope that my liver, healthy or not, would thank
me. Meanwhile, my toenails had steadily worsened and in the past year started to
make me concious in jiu-jitsu classes, especially when we studied ankle and heel
attacks.
I brought it up with my cousin while climbing Mission Peak the weekend before he
returned to Beijing. Wheezing and panting, he shared his experiences with
foot-massage or treatment, popular in the motherland, and readily prescribed
vinegar. ``Soak your feet in it for 15min a day,'' he said.
In a month, I was happy to report that my feet and toenails looked much better
now, the regular itching and burning under the skin, say after alcohol, were
gone and on the mat, I gladly put forward either foot, in its best look in a
decade, for my partners to mangle whichever way they liked.
