Vroom?

Dear Word Detective:  I’m curious about the origin of the phrase “go like sixty” or “run like sixty.”  It seems to me maybe a product of the 1920s or ’30s U.S. slang.  I first encountered it in a lyric sung by Billie Holiday in an obscure song called “Here It Is Tomorrow Again,” which has at the end of one verse “So kiss me quick and run like sixty ’cause here it is tomorrow again.” I wonder where that phrase came from, but it must have been fairly common at the time to turn up in a song lyric.  Sixty miles per hour, perhaps, that being considered a very high speed of travel at the time? — Slidedaddy.

That’s a very interesting question.  Sixty miles per hour is still a pretty high speed to drive, of course, especially for some people.  They seem to have real problems above about 5 mph.  Around here the authorities have taken to painting dotted lines on the road, showing the paste eaters where they should point their cars while turning a corner.  It doesn’t work.  Isn’t it nice to know we’re sharing the road with people who apparently flunked coloring in kindergarten?

“Go like sixty” rang a faint bell for me, but I can’t say where I’ve heard it before.  My first hunch was that your suggestion might well be the correct explanation.  Even after automobile ownership became common in this country, the average speeds on our roads were much lower than today.  To “go like sixty” might have been the fantasy of every farm boy in the early 20th century, leading to the phrase becoming the equivalent in the popular vocabulary of our “light speed” today.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), however, “like sixty” actually appeared in 1848 with no reference to speed, but rather meaning “with great force or vigor.”  The four citations quoted by the OED, in fact, are evenly divided between those that use the term in reference to speed (“We ran like sixty to the front porch,” 1975) and those that use it to mean “with enthusiasm and abandon” (“That child cuts up like sixty,” 1910).  The OED then refers us to the earlier phrase “like forty,” popular since the late 17th century, meaning “with great force.”  It appears that “like sixty” is just an inflated version of “like forty,” and didn’t, at least originally, have anything to do with speed.

By a stroke of luck, I happened to come across a discussion thread about the phrase “like sixty” on Dave Wilton’s wordorigins.org site, where one poster made an observation that seems to hold the key to “like forty” (and, by extension, to “like sixty”).  The number “forty” has long been used, including numerous times in the Bible, to signify a large but indeterminate  number of anything.  Noah and company endured forty days and forty nights of rain, Jesus wandered in the desert for forty days, as did the Jews for forty years in search of the Promised Land.  Many rulers mentioned in the Bible seem to have ruled for forty years.  Shakespeare used “forty” as an indefinitely large number in Coriolanus (“On faire ground I could beat fortie of them”), and we still speak of “forty winks” meaning “a good night’s sleep.”

So while Billie Holiday’s songwriter, and many of us since, may have interpreted “like sixty” as referring to speed, its predecessor “like forty” originally meant “with great force,” possibly, as in Shakespeare, with the underlying sense of “the strength or force of forty men.”

Without feathers.

Dear Word Detective:  What’s the origin of “the skinny?” I  heard the expression used countless times.  Yet again today in the NY Times the phrase cropped up again: “The skinny on figure modeling.” Go figure. —  Sid Miller.

That’s a good question.  I actually haven’t heard “the skinny” used in years, so I went looking in the New York Times for the article you mention, which turns out to be an interview with a figure model at the Arts Students League of New York.  In the paragraph where that phrase occurs, she’s talking about a popular model who weighed 350 pounds, so I guess the Times writer saw the opportunity for a little pun.  The Times loves little puns.  To be fair, they’re not alone in heeding the siren song of “skinny” puns.  Quite a few of the results for “the skinny” on Google News are stories touting “the skinny on dieting,” “the skinny on skin care,” or “the skinny on taxidermy.”  I made that last one up.  But I did see another story offering, in dubious taste, “the skinny on the Starbucks closings,” making a play on the whole “skinny latte” thing.

“The skinny,” of course, is slang for “the straight story,” more specifically “the inside scoop, the real story that most people don’t know.”  Not surprisingly, “the skinny” is often invoked by supermarket tabloids and websites that promise to satiate the public’s apparently insatiable desire for celebrity gossip.  The fact that we will probably never know what’s really up with Tom Cruise only seems to fuel their quest for “the skinny.”

Unfortunately, etymologists have their own quest when it comes to “the skinny,” the search for its origins, and so far we’ve come up empty.  We do know that the word apparently first became popular in US armed services slang during World War II, but actually predates the war by at least a few years.

More important than the “when” of “the skinny” is, of course, the “why,” and there are a number of clues as to the logic behind “the skinny.”  We know, for instance, that in the 1930s “the skinny” was slang for ten cents, probably drawn from the phrase “one thin dime.”  In the 1920s, “the skinny” was student slang at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, MD, for a course in physics or astronomy, but no one has ever come up with a logical explanation for that use, either.  Both of these leads are probably duds for our purposes.

A more intriguing possibility, suggested a few years ago by a poster to the American Dialect Society mailing list, is that “skinny” in this sense comes from the Irish word “sceitheanna,” meaning “act of revealing or making known” (and supposedly pronounced as something close to “skinny”).  It’s an interesting theory, but it may indicate just a coincidental intersection between Irish and English.

One of the simplest explanations of “the skinny,” and the one I’d bet is true, is that “skinny” in this sense simply refers to “getting down to the bare skin” (as in “skinny dipping”) of the truth, unadorned by spin, artifice or tact.  So if this is the logic behind the phrase, “the skinny” is just another way of saying “the naked truth.”