skeevy

Tag Archives: skeevy

Posted on May 4, 2021 | Leave a comment

We have a whole set of colloquial words for distasteful, disreputable, insalubrious things that you would generally shy away from or eschew outright: scuzzy, sleazy, sketchy, skeezy, skanky, scurvy, skeevy…

You can notice some commonalities, and you would not be off base to suspect some cross-influence. Usage of words can be influenced by the senses of other words they sound like, and if we make up a new word – especially one meant to be particularly vivid – we tend to draw on established sound patterns from other words of similar sense (I covered this in my master’s thesis, if you’d like some substantiation for it).

But of course there are some words that established the pattern and others that followed it. We can feel confident that scurvy, for instance, was an early entrant in this group; it showed up in its present form in the 1500s, and it traces (by way of scurf) back to Old English. Sleazy has been with us since the 1600s, though its origins are sketchy (while sketchy is more recent, but its origins aren’t sleazy).

And how about skeevy? That seems like a portmanteau, doesn’t it, or at least a phonaesthematic confection? It’s not. It showed up in English quite recently, apparently the 1970s, but its origins are, in their way, ancient and clear: it comes from an Italian word, schifo, ‘loathing’ or ‘crap’ (and its related verb, schifare, ‘loathe’). For those who don’t know, sch in Italian is pronounced like “sk.” And while the f is “f” in standard Italian, it can be voiced to “v” in regional varieties – such as the variety spoken in South Philadelphia, where skeevy appears to have entered English (this is the kind of Italian where prosciutto is said like “brazhoot” and capicola like “gabagool”).

And where does schifo come from? Not from Latin! Rather, Italian seems to have gotten it via Old French from Frankish, which in turn took it from Proto-Germanic *skeuhaz… which is also the source of English shy and eschew.

So skeevy just happened to sound appropriate when it was imported (in modified form) into English. But of course it might not have been imported if it had not sounded suitable! Now, if you’re looking for a word made up on the basis of just sounding right, try skeezy, which showed up in the early 1990s, evidently on the model of skeevy, sleazy, and the rest.

And what are the subtle shades of meaning between all these words? You know, that would probably make a good journal article… if not a whole dissertation. But if you have a sense of differences in how you would use them, don’t be shy, tell me; I love good usage data points.

skeevy, skeezy

Posted on March 14, 2015 | 1 comment

Neither of these words is used very often. Nonetheless, even if you haven’t seen either at all, I suspect you’ll have a sense of the meaning. And yes, they both mean largely the same thing. If I give you a sentence context you’ll understand the general intent. Here are a couple of quotations, obligingly supplied by the Oxford English Dictionary:

Zevon has built a career on well-crafted pop songs that tend to be either smartass and sensitive or smartass and skeevy. (Newsday, 1991)

He has the requisite erotic credentials—drugstore musk cologne, underarm sweat rings, skeezy tattoo, outer-boroughs grammar. (Los Angeles Times 1995)

Words like this are conditioned by phonetic profiling: what else they sound like. And what do they sound like? They both start with the /sk/ that is found on extensive and/or displeasing two-dimensional things: sky, skin, sketch, scum, scab, skank; they also have elements of sleazy, peeve, skivvies, skive, wheeze, sketchy, cheesy, easy, skeeter, and – for comic strip fans – Skeezix, a character supposedly named with a word for a lost calf, but it seems that the word skeezicks (the closest real-world spelling) was actually generally used to mean ‘rascal, rogue’.

So these words fall in line with sketchy and sleazy and skanky, with that thin wheedling /i/ vowel (which works well with pulling your mouth wide and the corners a bit down in revulsion), the fuzzy buzzing /v/ or /z/, and that hard, flat /sk/ onset. Were they just made up out of thin air because they sounded right?

Not quite. It starts with Italian (Tuscan) schifare ‘loathe’ and schifo ‘disgust’. Note that sch in Italian is pronounced /sk/, and in some versions of the language an f between vowels is said /v/ (a common transformation that, a millennium ago, was also the rule in English). These, at least in South Philadelphia, were borrowed over to English – quite possibly abetted by the sound resemblance to words of similar sense – to become skeevy, which was attested in print by the mid-1970s. Once that word became widely known, it was expectable that it would be modified to match the sleazy echo, especially since /izi/ endings are more common than /ivi/ ones in English. And, after all, this is an expressive word, with a sound-sense relation that is not seen as altogether arbitrary, so it’s more natural to change the sound to match what you feel. So by the early 1990s, we had skeezy, which is also a bit easier to say: you just take the tongue back to the tip, no need to involve the lips.

Is there a real difference between skeevy and skeezy? Aside from the one sounding closer to, say, evil and the other sounding closer to, say, easy? Well, Oxford adds “disreputable or immoral, esp. sexually” to – can you guess which? – skeezy. But dictionary.com specifies “not respectable; immoral” on… skeevy. Both agree that skeezy is sleazy, but Oxford says skeevy is too. Frankly, the whole thing seems a bit too… nebulous… you know… um, shady.