THINK SLINK

by Rob Lopresti

Not long after the Oscars Awards I heard someone refer to a woman’s outfit as slinky. That got me thinking about that word: what exactly does it mean, anyway?

I went to my favorite source for such information: the Oxford English Dictionary, where the word is listed as a proper noun (the toy) and as an adjective. Here are the definitions for the adjective:

Of a woman, esp. from the manner of her dress: sinuous, slender, gliding; of a garment: close-fitting, as if moulded to the figure. In extended use (with varying degrees of approval): stealthy, dextrous, furtive.

Frankly, I think the Oxford dons were nodding when they wrote this one. Usually they make it clear which meaning is the oldest, but here they don’t even take a shot at it. Also: dextrous? It’s a variation of dexterous, of course, but why would they choose that over the more common spelling, which even the OED lists in first place? Then there is the lack of any reference toslink. One who sneaks is sneaky. So what is one who slinks?

But back to slinky. Is there a logical progression from one meaning to another? How about: furtive leads to mysterious, which brings us to alluring which gives us close-fitting. Or if you prefer, dexterous to sinuous to close-fitting. Hmm. Maybe the Oxford scholars had a reason to be puzzled.

But what really bugged me was the OED’s choice of quotations. Here’s the oldest one they came up with, from Lady’s Home Journal:

Even now I seem to see in memory a slinky, slant-eyed person with long, slender finger nails, who wears green.

So, what do you think? Is the presumably Asian woman being described as sinuous or stealthy? But more troublesome, this quotation is from 1921.

Seriously? The logomeisters at Oxford couldn’t come up with any references older than that? Clearly it was time to let a librarian loose on the trail.

Making a slink

I have discussed Making of America before. It is a two-headed reference tool, produced by Cornell University and the University of Michigan and you have to search both sites to cover all the thousands of old books and journal articles they have available, for free.

I immediately ran into one of the problems with this type of system. Computers are reading the texts, not people, and computers are not perfect at understanding old fonts. So some of the pages that came up didn’t have the word slinky at all – but they did have shaky.

Which is not to say I didn’t beat the Oxford professors. I found an article in Harper’s,from 1855 with the title “Sketches in the East Indies – Pulo Pantang.” The author of this little masterpiece is unknown, and having read a sample of his work, I am not yearning to make his further acquaintance. In discussing how “precious ugly” the Malaysian women are he notes that “Their figures, however, are good; but it is hard to be graceful in those slinky robes…” So clearly the word meant some type of clothing, presumably tight, seventy years before the OED’s reference.

I found an earlier use of the word, in a Canadian comic novel,The sayings and doings of Samuel Slick, esq., also known as The Clockmaker. It was written between 1837 and 1840 by Thomas Chandler Haliburton. The narrator describes a “tall, limber-timbered, slinky-lookin’ man with the blue cloak and two long cords a-hangin’ from it…” I do like limber-timbered, don’t you? But clearly this is the furtive meaning, and the only early use I could find to refer to a man.

The inevitable Google

I then went to the font of all human knowledge, also known as Google, in this case to Google Books. It pulled up a lot of computer-misreadings – my favorite was somehow misreading think as slinky. But Google Books came up with a second use of the word in Haliburton’s Clockmaker and this one was a surprise. The narrator refers to a wet horse as “all slinky-slimy.”

So what meaning do we have here? Close-fitting, referring to the horse’s fur this time? Or something else?

But wait! There’s more. Google Books also gives us A History of North Country Words, written by John Trotter Brockett in 1829. He says that in the north part of Britain the word slinky or slonkymeant lank, lean.

And this led to a book with the sparkling title Poems on Various Subjects, published in 1818. The author William Muir, was a Scotsman, and his poem“The Live Lobster,” feels like a lesser effort by his friend Robert Burns. I sympathize with his distaste for the loathsome crustacean as a source of food. But if you are thinking this is going to be a reference to slinky as slimy, you’re doomed to disappointment. Here’s the relevant stanza.

As lang’s I can get milk and meal,
Or now an’ then a slinky veal,
Or Hawkie’s humps, or Hawkie’s heel.
Like some poor webster,
I’ll never fash myself a-weel about a lobster.”

Leaving aside the question of Hawkie’s Humps, scrumptious as they sound, I’d say that Muir meant lean, wouldn’t you?

Slinking to a conclusion

So what have we learned, besides the fact that etymology is a great time-sucker? Ignoring the Scottish/Northern detour, we can agree that by 1840 slinky already had the meanings of tight-fitting and furtive. Which makes me think that maybe it really started with the meaning slippery. What do you think?

One final thought, tangential even to this disconnected mess. I tried to look up our lobsterphobic poet William Muir and there isn’t much on the web about him. He died even younger than Bobby Burns, who wrote a lovely little elegy for him. It ends:

If there’s another world, he lives in bliss;
if there is none, he made the best of this.

Which demonstrates that we should all arrange to have a great poet write our obituary.