Get off on the wrong foot
Meaning
Make a bad start to a project or relationship.
Origin
This has the sound of an old expression – from Shakespeare, the Bible or similar. Shakespeare did use the notion of a ‘better’ foot (which implies a wrong foot) in King John, 1596:
KING JOHN:
Nay, but make haste; the better foot before.
O, let me have no subject enemies,
When adverse foreigners affright my towns
With dreadful pomp of stout invasion!
Be Mercury, set feathers to thy heels,
And fly like thought from them to me again.
Richard Harvey, in Plaine Perceuall the peace-maker of England, 1590, is the first to record the wrong foot in print:
“Thou putst the wrong foote before.”
Despite the implication otherwise in the phrase put your best foot forward we only have two choices, so if there’s a wrong foot there has to be a right one too and get off on the right foot is also in common use.
