swink

Let’s say you’re a wonk in want of work. A bit of swank could give you wings, if you could swing it, but you have bills owing, and as much as you’d like to swan up and take a win, you’ll even let some swain treat you like a swine if you can wangle a sweet trip to the bank. If their needs and yours are in sync, quick as a wink, you’ll swink.

Sorry, you do know what swink means, don’t you? Perhaps not. It means (verb) ‘work hard’ and (noun) ‘hard work’ – or, to put it another way, ‘toil’ and ‘toil’. It is what causes the sweat of your brow: labour, brutal cursèd labour, under the hot sun with nary a drink of water – or, more broadly, such drudgery as might be experienced in ten hours at a sewing machine, or perhaps five hours coaching in a cold rink. Indeed, even the lowly copywriter or copyeditor might swink until their fingers are swollen and stained with ink. (Well, OK, digital enhancements have changed the physical evidence. But drudgery is drudgery.)

Why would we have this word swink to mean such a thing? That’s how it goes with English and its etymons. The source of this word, which has been with English as long as English has been with us, is apparently Germanic *swinkaną, which meant ‘swing, bend’. The next question, obviously, is “Is *swinkaną also the root of, or related to, swing?” And the answer, as far as I can see, is “Uh… we’re working on it. Hard.”

I have to say, though, swink doesn’t immediately make me think of hard work. Sure, it doesn’t have that broad sweeping vowel of swank, but sonically the relation between swank and swink is like that between cramp and crimp: different actions, but related in tone. They could even be like sank and sink, which is a question of nothing other than time: I sink, and then I sank; I swink, and then I can have swank (not the same as having swunk – the past participle of swink is swinked, anyway).