Although my dad, who never made it past high school, took pride in his vocabulary, he was not beyond vulgarity– undoubtedly resulting from his Bronx roots and likely nurtured by his 3-year stint in the Navy.  One of the vulgar sayings I heard emanating from my father was that a particular person didn’t know shit from Shinola.

Shinola was a popular brand of shoe polish, presumably with enough of a cachet that it could be used to distinguish the high quality stuff that was applied to the top surface of your shoes from the low quality stuff that might be found clinging to the bottom. It also had a nice alliterative ring to it, more so than the other phrase I heard my father say in similar situations– that a particular person didn’t know his ass from his elbow.

Although Shinola was the “good stuff” and the other wasn’t, I came to associate the two words.  One became what behaviorists call the “discriminatory stimulus” for the other, which in English means that one thing signaled the presence of the other.   I was therefore surprised the other day to see an advertisement in a magazine for a new Wright Brothers commemorative watch made by, you guessed it, the Shinola Company.  That took me to the Internet, to find out how it came to be that a shoe polish company began manufacturing watches.   What I learned is that the modern Shinola Company, headquartered in a beautiful building in Detroit, began three years ago after the initial investors bought the rights to the Shinola name from the New York based company that had since gone out of business.  Besides watches, the new Shinola manufactures leather goods, journals and bicycles, all made nearly exclusively from American components, or so they claim.

Now, exactly what brought the owner of the Shinola brand to buy a name from a defunct company that is associated with shoe polish seemed intriguingly out of the shoebox to me.   Shinola has a great website (www.shinola.com), and on it they claim to be “reinvigorating a storied American brand.”

The new Shinola has been criticized because while it is true that its products are assembled in Detroit, a place badly in need of resurrection itself, most of its parts emanate from elsewhere in the U.S., and some come from abroad, including China.  “It’s not like we’re saying everything is 100% made in Detroit,” said company President Jacques Panis.    The fact that the new Shinola isn’t all about Detroit doesn’t bother me all that much; I’m not sure that the economic interdependence of nations isn’t a bad thing.

I don’t know whose decision it was to buy the rights to the Shinola brand name, but to me that is the intriguing part of the story.  Clearly, the idea that someone didn’t know shit from Shinola resulted from the fact that Shinola shoe polish was, in its day, considered the bomb, to use current parlance.  But for me, even the idea that Shinola was supposed to be a sign of quality gets lost by its contiguity with the stuff that all living critters deposit.

I imagine that if I were to buy and wear one of those watches, as Bill Clinton proudly does, I would be compelled to roll up my sleeve and declare, “See, I really do know the difference!”