Is there such a thing as women’s novelty socks? For socks to qualify as “novelty” they have to display some kind of kooky characteristic that sets them apart from the norm – which, if we take as our definition of socks the “fabricated thing worn to encase the foot”, makes women’s novelty socks pretty hard to find. As far as this writer can tell, there’s so much awesomeness out there to encase a woman’s foot that we either class it all as women’s novelty socks or take a stand against the whole idea and say that women’s novelty socks cannot exist.
To explain: women’s novelty socks have to evince some quality of “novelness” otherwise they’re just women’s socks. To measure the novelness of a pair of socks one is claiming are women’s novelty socks, against a normal pair of women’s socks, one has to have a norm against which to measure. Find me such a norm and I will eat my own socks, let alone any women’s novelty socks you might wish to feed me. The world of women’s socks appears to be one vast plethora of women’s novelty socks: stripey socks; bobbled socks; socks with toes in. Given that retailer’s definitions of novelty socks (and, therefore, by extension “women’s novelty socks”) appears to be “anything that has a pattern on it”, all women’s socks must be women’s novelty socks, which makes none of them novel. Ipso facto, women’s novelty socks are a figment of retailer’s imaginations.
That said, there are some darn fine “women’s novelty socks” out there, should you be able to ignore semantic quibbling over whether or not they really exist. Standing at a till in H&M holding a pair of brightly striped pop sox, one would be disposed to imagine you are easily able to believe that women’s novelty socks do exist, in which case we might recommend a pair of Burton “Punked” women’s novelty socks – which, at a mere seventeen quid for a “heavyweight spandex” sock that looks like an Etch-a-Sketch’s bad dream, makes them novel in more ways than one.
