Circumstances have changed, and you and I have changed places. This saying began life as the boot is on the other leg, appearing in print in the mid-nineteenth century. Putting the left shoe on the right foot would, of course, entail considerable discomfort, a meaning retained in the metaphor, which implies “See how you like being in my place.” Winston Churchill used it in My African Journal (1908): “Here . . . the boot is on the other leg, and Civilization is ashamed of her arrangements in the presence of a savage.”