Hinky, or hincty, is a term going back to the 1920’s that has meant both “snobbish” and “haughty,” or, more commonly, suspicious. A police officer from Grove City, Pennsylvania, calls to say his older colleagues often use the word to describe someone who arouses suspicion. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Hinky”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Chris Taggart from Grove City, Pennsylvania.
Hey, Chris, welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Thanks.
Thanks.
Good, how are you guys?
All right.
What can we help you with?
Well, I’m a police officer, and when I first started, I heard a word that was used by older officers that I’d never heard before, and that word is hinky.
Is it H-I-N-K-Y?
Well, yeah, I think it is, but we don’t use it in reports.
Okay.
It’s a little bit of slang, and it’s used whenever, you know, you feel something like indescribably suspicious or, you know, something’s not right about someone that you can’t describe.
Like, you get a funny feeling where the hair goes up on the back of your neck.
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
And so your question was, what do we know about it?
Yeah, I mean, where did it come from?
Do we know, you know, I’d never heard it before I started in police work.
And it’s usually used by the older guys.
I only knew it from police shows until I really got it into slang.
You will frequently find this, for example, on the old show NYPD Blue.
They used it all the time.
I can remember the character Sipowitz.
It’s one of his favorite vocabulary words.
But there’s some stuff that we know from the slang dictionaries about this.
The Historical Dictionary of American Slang actually has two entries that apply.
They’re kind of the same word.
Actually, if I was doing this entry, I’d probably combine them into a single entry.
But one of them spells it H-I-N-K-Y.
And another one spells it H-I-N-C-T-Y.
And the older one is the Hincti one, H-I-N-C-T-Y.
And it dates back to the 1920s with two meanings that come up at about the same time.
One of them comes up in the African-American community in about 1920, 25.
So it means snobbish or haughty, fastidious even.
And then at the same time, coming up in police language and the kind of the language of the underworld, it comes up and it means, just like you said, feeling suspicious or having caution or just feeling like something’s not quite right, which is typically how it’s used in scripted dialogues and television shows and movies these days.
And it’s not too much of a surprise that these two meanings should come up at once.
They’re a lot closer than you might think.
They both suggest in the observer a feeling of heightened sensation, that what you’re observing is beyond the norm.
And that’s, so it doesn’t surprise, and also slang when it starts out is often really variable.
It has a wide range, you know, a big array of meanings that are gradually winnowed down to one or two.
So, Chris, is that how the older guys would say it?
Like, this situation’s hinky, there’s something hinky about this guy?
Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Yeah, and that’s used, you know, between officers.
You know, no one would usually say that in front of the public.
Huh, interesting.
And under the hinky entry without the C in the middle, H-I-N-K-Y, in the 1950s, some uses start to pop up in written language that showed that it meant nervous or jumpy.
So you might describe a suspect or a skull that way, right?
Where they, you know, there’s something hinky about this guy because he’s literally fidgeting.
He can’t control his blabber mouth.
He can’t look at you in the eyes.
It’s that sort of thing.
So it’s a little bit beyond suspicious.
It’s more about behavior.
Yeah, yeah.
That’s on point.
That’s right.
So that’s what we know.
I’m actually really surprised, to be honest, that it’s still out there in the field.
I always thought it was just kind of fossilized in TV shows at this point.
Well, I mean, maybe I work with some fossils, but don’t tell them that.
And my daddy was a cop for a long time.
I don’t remember it ever coming out of his mouth, but who knows?
Well, thank you very much.
That’s really interesting.
Thanks, Chris.
Take care now.
Yeah, call us again sometime.
Thank you, you too.
All right, bye-bye.
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