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#1 2009-06-23 04:34:58

burred
Eggcornista
From: Montreal
Registered: 2008-03-17
Posts: 1112

Skintflint

Skint is British slang for impecunious, from skinned. A skinflint is someone so miserly he would shave a tiny, cheap flint into slices to save money (link). The blend of these two into skintflint might indicate, on the face of it, someone too strapped to be able to afford even a flint. But more likely it represents the substitution of a resonant word for another close in spelling and sound. This may complete the “reduplication” of sound that skinflint began, since an earlier expression that makes more sense to me is, “so cheap he would skin a flea”. An 1875 publication refers to Messrs. Skinflint and Skinflea (link).

Poultry chat:
I don’t feed organic pellets as i’m a skintflint but i know I really should…
(http://www.poultrychat.com/vb/showthread.php?t=6577)

I made the decision to use Linux at home because I’m an old fashioned stickler for using only legal software, and a skintflint when it comes to paying for it.
(http://www.elliottoti.com/index.php?m=200406)

A skim flint is an alternative that suggests skimming the surface? Skimming off the top? Or so cheap you just skim the flint?

Baseball blog:
This organization has proceeded to cheap skate and skim flint on all the positions around him so bad that this team is absolutely unwatchable.
(http://blogs.ajc.com/mark-bradley-blog/ … adley_blog)

Long Hair Community:
I am a skimflint when it comes to girly stuff like shampoo
(http://www.archive.longhaircommunity.co … 048&page=3)

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#2 2009-06-23 07:20:49

DavidTuggy
Eggcornista
From: Mexico
Registered: 2007-10-11
Posts: 2714
Website

Re: Skintflint

The only time I spent more than a day or a few hours in England we were in Buckinghamshire, and wandering through the beautiful woods there we kept finding odd-shaped small rocks about the size of a fruit, with translucent greenish-gray quartz-like “flesh” on the inside and a whitish rough-textured covering like a skin on the outside. (I brought a couple back and probably still have them somewhere around the house.) A geologically knowledgeable friend told me that these were petrified sponges from a prehistoric sea that had covered the area (the water having risen during the Atlantean human-induced global warming episode, no doubt.) The locals told me that these were flints, and the stone was, indeed, very hard. Some houses in the area were built of this kind of stone.
.
The Wikipedia article on flint confirms a good deal of this.
.
I suppose, though I do not know it for sure, that the word skinflint was coined with reference to this kind of flint, and that the notion was more literally one of skinning the rock rather than slicing it. The pelt of a flint would be of minimal value and would be extremely difficult to remove, but a true skinflint would try, and probably manage, to do it anyway.
.
The number of creative words meaning ‘miser’, and especially words of the “scarecrow” V+Object=Subject type, is impressive. We (or at least I) still use skinflint, clutchfist and pinchpenny , but a lot of others were used historically. Using nip alone, the OED listed nipcake, nipcrumb, nipcheese, nipfarthing and niptoast .

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-06-23 09:29:53)


*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

(Possible Corollary: it is, and we are .)

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#3 2009-06-23 08:31:51

burred
Eggcornista
From: Montreal
Registered: 2008-03-17
Posts: 1112

Re: Skintflint

Enlightening, thanks, David. Neat trick with the paper. A real quemacoco.

So if I understand you correctly, I have contributed to a folk-etymology by confusing two different kinds of flint – the kind I know, that is in cigarette lighters and in boy scout emergency kits (and is quite soft), and another kind, flinty flint, which is an extremely hard form of quartz. I love it when that happens!

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#4 2009-06-23 09:33:41

DavidTuggy
Eggcornista
From: Mexico
Registered: 2007-10-11
Posts: 2714
Website

Re: Skintflint

burred wrote:

Enlightening, thanks, David. Neat trick with the paper. A real quemacoco.

I hope you mean it lets light in from the top, rather than that it fries the brain.


*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

(Possible Corollary: it is, and we are .)

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#5 2009-06-23 11:42:38

burred
Eggcornista
From: Montreal
Registered: 2008-03-17
Posts: 1112

Re: Skintflint

A bit of both. I can remember, from before I blacked out, a lot of light, all around, and then a smell of burning toast. Must be the hamthrax.

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#6 2009-06-23 12:32:25

DavidTuggy
Eggcornista
From: Mexico
Registered: 2007-10-11
Posts: 2714
Website

Re: Skintflint

A[nother] friend of mine once commented, at the end of a grueling week of listening to linguistic papers, “I don’t think any neurons are frying any more.”


*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

(Possible Corollary: it is, and we are .)

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