Eggcorn Forum

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.
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The Wikipedia article on flint confirms a good deal of this.
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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.
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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)

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.

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.”