Goody two-shoes? What does that mean?!
It must be something bad. Really, terribly bad. I’ve never heard anything positive about a goody two-shoes. I’ve never heard anyone aspire to being one. Obviously there’s no good in that kind of goody.
Goody two-shoes are mocked, derided, and scorned. They are held in contempt and as a standard of what not to be.
Why?
OK, after writing all that, I looked up the term and found these two helpful entries:
A prudish, self-righteous individual, a goody-goody. For example, Phyllis was a real goody two-shoes, tattling on her friends to the teacher. This expression alludes to the main character of a nursery tale, The History of Goody Two-Shoes (1765), who was so pleased when receiving a second shoe that she kept saying “Two shoes.” The goody in the story is short for goodwife but means “goody-goody” in the idiom.
Source: dictionary.com
That helps. I’ve even met people like that. And people I thought were like that, but I discovered later my own weakness propelled me to a huge leap onto a wrong, unjust conclusion. Andrée over at World magazine experienced something similar:
Mary Jo was practically perfect. Of all the coeds she was by far the most wholesome, like the song out of West Side Story: “modest and pure, polite and refined, well-bred and mature.” Never an untoward word, never a scandalizing outfit, never a hint of gossip, jealousy, or hippie free love, nothing but kind, cheerful, and honoring of her parents. And one day I was fed up with it.
So she unloaded on Mary Jo.
Here are some other things I noted in the article:
- “Resolved conflict, even decades later, makes the end of a thing better than its beginning.”
- “Mary Jo didn’t flee the scene and didn’t breathe a word in her defense: She stood like a sheep led to slaughter.”
- When we wrong someone, it’s easy to later get into “the submissive dog posture.”
- Mary Jo’s response decades later: “I just want you to know that it’s OK. Nothing has changed my love for you.”
- After receiving Andrée’s written apology, Mary Jo hadn’t responded right away, preferring “to pray about it and wait for just the right words.”
- Perhaps we react to goody two-shoes (real as well as mischaracterized) for the same reason Cain reacted to Abel: “because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous” (1 John 3:12).
- “You can’t make it right. You can’t make a past misdeed better. But you can make yourself better.”
I’m guessing it would do you good to read the whole piece: A letter to Mary Jo
And the next time you take to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or your blog to lather some snark on a toasted goody two-shoes, restrain yourself and search your own heart instead.
You might learn something. And spare yourself something.