Meaning
To have two left feet is to be clumsy or awkward in movement, especially when dancing, tripping, mistiming steps or moving stiffly. Usually self-deprecating or affectionately teasing rather than a serious criticism of someone. Informal and jocular, most often self-deprecating. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The phrase trades on the old association of the left side with clumsiness and bad fortune, visible in Latin sinister and in French gauche, which literally means left but also awkward. The documented record shows the hands came first: 'to have two left hands', a loan translation of the French avoir deux mains gauches, is recorded from December 1815 in a London newspaper, and the Oxford English Dictionary dates 'to have two left feet (also hands)' from 1857, when George Augustus Sala wrote in Dickens's Household Words that he seemed born with two left hands and two left feet. The feet-only version became the usual form in the early twentieth century: the OED's earliest feet-only citation is from Wodehouse in 1915, and his story 'The Man with Two Left Feet' of 1916, collected in 1917, fixed the phrase in popular memory.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- be born with two left feet
- have two left feet
- I've got two left feet
- two left hands
Usage Examples
- I would love to join the salsa class, but I have two left feet.
- On the ice rink, her two left feet were a genuine hazard to everyone nearby.
- He blames his two left feet for avoiding the dance floor at every wedding.