Word Histories

fink

When President Bush announced at a Rose Garden ceremony last May that the federal government would begin a nationwide campaign to immunize children against a variety of communicable diseases, public-health experts were skeptical. The chairman of the Federal Immunization Practices Advisory Committee, Dr. Samuel L. Katz, told reporters that a similar proposal had been announced eleven months earlier, but that Administration officials had “finked out and did not follow through after they had a big Rose Garden show.” To fink out (to withdraw support from a project or scheme, to renege) comes, of course, from fink (an unpleasant, contemptible person; a strike-breaker; an informer, or to inform on). The origin of fink is unknown. It may be from the German Fink (finch) and the colloquial German Schmierfink (a low, dirty person; a hack—literally, a greasy or dirty bird). Schmierfink was shortened to Fink, and became university slang for a student who was not officially enrolled. Once in America, it came to mean a dissolute, untrustworthy person (“‘That guy is a rat.’ . . . ‘So’s the fink with him’”—Ernest Booth, Stealing Through Life, 1929). Other sources say that fink dates from the Homestead Strike of 1892, which operatives of the Pinkerton detective agency, contemptuously referred to as Pinks and then finks, were employed to break. Finally, another derivation stresses the sense “informer,”claiming that fink is an abbreviation of to finger, meaning “to inform on or point out to the police.”

berserk

In an attempt to make sense of the Los Angeles riots of last spring, the syndicated columnist William Raspberry suggested that they were “analogous to a rampage by a berserk man whose rage is triggered by his having been reminded, once again, that he doesn’t matter.” The history of berserk (wild, frenzied) begins in ancient Scandinavia, where the Norse warrior was known as a berserkr, from ber- (the root of björn, “bear”) and serkr (shirt). (From serkr comes the English dialect sark, “shirt” or “skirt,” and the Scots cutty sark, “short skirt; hussy.”) The warriors were famed for working themselves into a frenzy. Then, supposedly invulnerable to steel and fire, they recklessly threw themselves into battle wearing only bearskin shirts. Around the early nineteenth century a renewed literary interest in Old Norse folklore and language led to the adoption into English of berserker, “a frenzied, savage person,” which also appeared as berserkar (“Mere brotherhood in arms ... did not distinguish the civilized man from the berserkar”—Charles H. Pearson, Early and Middle Ages of Eng-land, 1861). Users of the word mistakenly interpreted it as having the agent-noun suffix -er and the meaning “one who goes berserk.” This led to the coining of the adjective berserk by back-formation—that is, by dropping the supposed suffix (“With her kindly, uncontrollable vivacity, in the brisk winter air she became more “berserk’ as she went on”—Henry Kingsley, Silcote of Silcotes, 1867).

hip

A coalition of advocacy organizations for children’s television recently filed a petition asking the Federal Communications Commission to rule that a proposed Saturday-morning show titled Yo! It’s the Chester Cheetah Show! would be no more than a “program-length commercial.” Chester Cheetah is a cartoon character created to sell Cheetos, a cheese-flavored snack made by Frito-Lay. He calls himself “a cool dude in a loose mood” and a ”hip kitty,”harking back to hip cat or, more commonly, hep cat—slang dating from the swing era and popularized in the forties and

fifties, meaning “one who is keenly aware of what is new or smart.” The origin of hip is disputed. One authority claims that it originated with the expression on the hip (smoking opium), since opium smokers, or hip-layers, practiced their

vice reclining on one side. Other sources suggest that hip is a variant of hep, which may have come from the drill sergeant’s cadence count “hep, two, three, four” (hep being easier to shout than “left”), first used during the Civil War

era (“[We] followed in three squads, of thirty or more each, our music the euphonious “hep, hep, hep’ of our instructors”— George C. Strong, Cadet Life at West Point, 1862). The soldier who was always in step was hep. Another explanation has it that in the 1890s hep was the name of a Chicago bartender, Joe Hep, who was a person in the know. Finally, hep may be from the English dialect word heppen, meaning “bandy, deft, clever at work" (“He’s a heppen chap, that: he can to’n [turn] his hand to owt that comes to it”—English Dialect Dictionary), itself probably a borrowing from Old Norse heppinn (lucky, dexterous).