The phenomenon of the missing sock has been around
for centuries.  Incredibly, it has had
its affect upon some famous people in history.

The classical Greek philosopher Socrates (469 BC – 399 BC) was the inventor of socks and, with an
uncharacteristic show of pride, named them after himself, using his wife’s pet
name for him (“Please rub my back, Socks dear.”) .  Following his design, she would craft these
socks for him out of the hair taken from the hides of slaughtered oxen and
sheep.  This ancient technique of
pressing animal hair into felt was how socks were made prior to the discovery
of spinning and weaving.  Plato
mistakenly perpetuated the misconception regarding the death of Socrates being
the result of his trial for impiety and corrupting the minds of youth.  It is true that Socrates took his own life by
drinking the poison hemlock.  According to
recently unearthed documents, however, what caused him to do this was his accelerating
disgust with the constant and frustrating loss of his precious socks, almost
always losing just one of the pair.

Then there was the famous Italian poet Dante (c. 1265 – 1321), known for his
masterpiece trilogy The Divine Comedy,
including the Inferno which purports to describe in poetic form Dante’s descent
into Hell.  As we know the great work
today, Dante included nine circles of Hell wherein the damned suffered the
eternal pain of unique punishment designed ironically and appropriately to relate
back to their specific sins.  What
scholars have neglected to mention is that originally Dante had created ten circles but his editor excised the
tenth one.  In that circle, Dante
envisioned foot fetishists, people who wear socks with sandals, and washing
machine salesmen doomed to forever pursue missing socks blowing in the infernal
maelstrom.