What does the expression “not good for shoe soles” mean?
During an argument, you may hear: “Он в подметки не годится” (“on v podmyotki ne goditsa”) or he's “not good for shoe soles”! What do shoe soles have to do with it?
In the old days, they used to wear ‘lapti’ (bast shoes) woven out of tree bast. To make them last longer, leather soles were attached to them. The material had to be durable, otherwise they quickly became unusable. On average, one pair could be worn out in four days during the warm season! Poor quality leather, of course, could not be used for shoe soles.
That is why the expression “not good for shoe soles” began to be used when someone wanted to draw attention to the bad qualities of something.
In Chekhov's story ‘Belated Flowers’, the protagonist falls in love with the doctor who treated her and her brother: “She looked at him and compared his face with those faces that she has to see every day. How unlike this scholarly, tired face were the haggard, dull faces of her suitors, Yegorushka's friends, who bore her with their daily visits! The faces of idlers and drunkards, from whom she, Marusya, had never heard a single kind, decent word, were ‘not good for shoe soles’ for this cold, impassive, but intelligent, arrogant face.”
One could also say: “It does not compare in any way”, “There is nothing to look at” or “It should be worse, but there is nowhere to go”. An English equivalent would be: “Not fit to hold a candle.”
