Used to express annoyance at one’s shoes that the laces that hold the boot to the wearer’s foot are troublesome or tricksy, and something needs to be remedied before another step can be tooken (see tooken).
This can result from a number of shoelace situations, such as one that repeatedly undoes itself, or another that is knotted in such a way that it must be cut by use of a machetette (a tiny, cute machete that can fit in a baby’s hand). Shoelace mathematicians that have taken the time to study these pheknotema (see pheknotema) believe that the number of nooseance situations are most likely infinite, though the published research indicates they stopped counting at around 11, or as is more commonly expressed, just before lunch.
The derivation of this word inevitably comes from the medieval zone. In the much maligned executioner community, who would deal day-to-day with troublesome knots when hanging or unhanging their well-hung hanged clients and clientele, the term would be rattled off in private conversations in the nooks of dungeons and leaning by gallows alike. This was captured by Dunne in his famous sonnet A Licence to Kille (1438):
Aye, tis death that ties us, binds us to the mill, this cord thus, like ye ma’aers’ umbillical; ‘nowt but a noosance knot’, said one hoode to t’other ‘not til the moment expired will oor hearts be sette free nae oor tiredness retired’.
As ropes shrunk over the years, shoe manufacturers started to implement the technology into their designs, and alongside it the discourse around the knots used to create nooses also transferred, similarly reducing in size. The threshold therefore for what was deemed a nooseance became less and less, and the term now could be frivolously expressed with any relevant medium - from balloons to ribbons, to string to hair.
In the 20th Century, in the final days of government sanctioned execution, tastes for how to force a person’s life account inactive fluctuated like the wind. One week, a gang of men might shoot a blindfolded thief, when the next it was a lethal cocktail of chemicals served to a convicted murderer in syringes like some a terrible zombie-themed nightclub chaser. Even with the advent of flashy lasers and space pills, the lawful execution of the damned returned to the humble gallows, as it had a more solemn vibe that looked better in newspapers.
Alongside this return, professional death deliverers with their trademark dark humour coined this era of a return to hanging as a kind of renooseance.
