A prison employee wants to know about the term shank, that name for sharp weapons made with toothbrushes and pieces of metal. It derives from shank in the sense of the type of animal bone historically used in weapon making. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Shank Weapon”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, I’m so excited to be on the air.
My name is Amber. I’m calling from Berlin, New Hampshire.
And I work in a prison, and one word that I am really curious where it came from is the word shank, like to mean like a homemade weapon.
I had heard shiv before, but shank is more like a newer term that everybody’s using.
I don’t hear shiv very often.
Shank and shiv are the same thing?
People talk about them like they’re the same thing.
For those of us who have never been to prison, can you tell us what a shank or a shiv is?
Usually it’s some kind of a homemade weapon that people make, you know, a sharpened out toothbrush or a piece of wood or some kind of a rod or something that’s sharp on one end.
So you probably know shank as it’s related to the part of a horse’s leg, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Like the first place I heard from it probably is just like a beef shank.
Okay, yeah.
So over time, shank has meant different parts of a leg, but generally we know shank now to be from the knee to the ankle.
Okay.
There are a wide variety of terms related to that.
But that is a particularly interesting bone on an animal because it is long, it is straight, and it is strong.
And it has been used since prehistoric times to create weapons and to create tools for digging, for carving, for doing a variety of different tool-related tasks.
Oh, then that follows real easy then.
Yeah, it’s totally easy.
Yeah, and so you’ll even see a little bit of a skeuomorphic representation today in bone-handled knives, which actually are, you can actually split the top of a shank bone and insert an arrowhead or a piece of glass or a bit of obsidian or some other sharp object in there, wrap it around with sinew or twine or sisal or something like that, and you’ve got a great weapon if you’re out in the woods, I mean, over the millennia, you know, to do what needs to be done, kill a rabbit or carve off a piece of hide or whatever.
So it’s always been a homemade weapon.
Shank is a term for the bone, has linked itself to a wide variety of things that resemble the shape of a shank or are related to the shank in its use or have just even a vague relationship to some of the things that the shank is used for.
That’s very interesting.
Thank you so much for looking into that.
Yeah, no problem.
As someone who studies slang, the world of prison slang is incredibly interesting to me.
And so I love hearing from you, Amber, and I hope that you’ll come back to us again in the future and tell us some more of what you’re learning there, all right?
Well, definitely. Thank you so much.
Yeah, take care now.
Okay. Thanks, Amber. Bye-bye.
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