I just asked a question on The Great Outdoors SE about snowshoes, and said that I found large snowshoes hard to manipulate, and then changed manipulate to pedipulate, not even knowing if that was a word. But it is! Oxford Living Dictionaries says of pedipulate:
rare
[with object] To work with the feet. Chiefly humorous
And then says of its origin:
Late 19th century; earliest use found in Family Herald. Humorously from pedi- + -pulate, after manipulate.
I looked up pedipulate, synonyms and, on the first two pages of the Google response, found no synonyms. The closest I got was on Foboko, which said:
Synonyms for pedipulate
No synonyms were found for this word
But this source did not have a definition or a sample sentence either, so they know less than I do. And on page two, the search degenerated into "how to use uttermost in a sentence", which is unhelpful to the uttermost.
One could, of course, use phrases like "less clumsy", but is there an unhumorous synonym for pedipulate? I could even use manipulate and people would know what I meant, but is manipulate the only non-humorous answer to my Q?
Sample sentence: I find it difficult to ____________ large snowshoes.
Response to Comment of @1006a: A generic term is too easy. I'd like something that references feet or brings feet immediately to mind.
