Skosh

Filed Under April 2007, columns 

It just takes a smidgen …

Dear Word Detective: I checked your alphabetical listing of words past but it didn’t help. The main problem is that I don’t know how the word would be spelled. I used to hear this term a lot as a youngster in the 1970’s (I believe it was even used in a blue jean commercial at the time), and heard it in “The Drew Carey Show” once in the last 5 years, but I’m considering reviving the word. The word is “skosh” (long o), and it means “a bit” or “a tad,” as in “a skosh more room in the seat of those jeans.” Do you have any history on the origins of this fun term? — Micki Morrison.

Well, you’ve done everything right in asking your question. You checked our archive of back columns, you’ve pinned down a time frame and suggested the venues in which you heard the word, and even supplied the pronunciation. This definitely beats the questions I receive that consist of just one bizarre word (”fisselstorp?”) and a mangled AOL address. By the way, you probably noticed that my web index is not as flawlessly alphabetical as one might wish. I guess I simply wasn’t paying attention for large parts of first grade.

Now all I have to do is pull back the curtain and reveal the answer, which fortunately turns out to be easy in this case. “Skosh,” meaning “a little bit,” is derived from the Japanese word “sukoshi,” which means “a little amount” or “a few.” The Anglicized form “skosh” first appeared in the US in the early 1950s (the first printed citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1955), and it’s likely that the term was imported by US service personnel serving in Japan either in the period of American occupation after World War II or during the Korean War. The word is usually pronounced, as you say, with a long “o.” Interestingly, in the Japanese “sukoshi,” the “u” is not voiced, so the English pronunciation is remarkably close to the Japanese.

You’re also correct about hearing “skosh” used in a TV commercial, one that ran in the late 1970s for the then-new Levis for Men, which featured a “skosh more room” in the seat for the increasingly pear-shaped US couch-potato demographic. Mercifully, most of those guys had stopped wearing bell-bottoms by then.

 

 

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