A colleague of mine mentioned my ‘plimsolls’ the other day, when talking about these:
I realised that I had not heard the word plimsoll for ages. I wondered if the ones below were trainers or sneakers, rather than plimsolls.
A look at Wikipedia was not very elucidating either. Are they all the same thing?
The nickname for plimsolls was “plimmies” in my day and they were definitely for exercise. We wore them for pretty much all sports, indoors and outdoors, except hockey, for which we had proper hockey boots. Plimsolls were either elasticated or lace-up but the elasticated ones were for little children. They were usually black, but we wore white plimmies for tennis and those had to be whitened with a thick liquid whitener that came with a wide sponge tip.
I remember that white liquid so well!
Plimsoll is a definite blast from the past! I’d probably call your splendid purple shoes plimsolls on the grounds they’re not trainers (you wouldn’t exercise in them, I assume!) Sneakers is rarely heard in the UK. I’d call the Converse footwear baseball boots. When I think of plimsolls, I do tend to think of the pull-on things with the elastic insert that we wore at school for PE. They also got called daps, although that may be regional.
I know, right? When I heard the word it seemed so quaint that I thought I would write about it!