Skell Slang

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Will calling from Queens. How are you guys?

Queens, New York. Hello, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me. I’m calling in with a word that I was introduced to when I first started out working in EMS in New York City.

And the term is skell, spelled S-K-E-L-L, which when I first heard it, I assumed was a kind of shortening of skeleton.

But after years of using it without really knowing the etymology, I decided to look it up and learned that it was actually from a 17th century English term that was more or less the same.

But initially it meant kind of someone who would feign either being injured or crippled in some way to work better as a panhandler.

So it was kind of more specifically a con artist.

And in law enforcement, the fire services and EMS in New York City, the term scale, which is a contraction of the original word, is used as a noun to describe someone who’s kind of a little bit sketchy or potentially criminal.

I just had no idea that it was so directly linked back to the 17th century to a kind of similar term and that it survived all these centuries in this one kind of grouping of professions.

Yeah, that’s kind of the problem with that etymological story is that it’s a big gap between it being used in the 1600s and then popping up in Brooklyn in the late 1940s, which is where it first appears in the U.S.

It’s like we’re talking 300 and something years where it literally doesn’t appear in print at all.

And then suddenly scale pops up in Brooklyn.

I just have a hard time buying the etymology.

I agree that skelder was a word and I agree it means work as a beggar to commit little scams and frauds to make a living.

But that gap just as a lexicographer just makes me pause and really question that as the origin.

But I love what you’re saying about Skel being this term that’s like, why is this term only in New York?

Why is it only used by the EMS and the police and the fire services?

Skel is derogatory, though, right?

Yeah, it’s kind of the equivalent of calling someone like a lowlife or a getchy dude.

There are a lot of related slang words like Skelgel, the term for hand sanitizer.

Oh, have you used that one?

Yeah, the main term we use for it.

Oh, really?

There’s also, I think it’s related just because it’s almost identical, but in South African slang, there’s a term, Skelm, S-K-E-L-M, that essentially means the same thing.

It’s kind of low-life, kind of sketchy dude.

Yeah, and they’re related words in German and Dutch, but again, it’s the same problem.

It’s existed in South Africa continuously, fortunately, since the 1800s, only in South Africa.

Again, how does it get to South Africa, to New York in the 1940s?

We just don’t have it.

I’ll tell you one thing, though.

When it first appears in the late 1940s in New York, it’s in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, always in this column by George Curry.

And he talks about scales over and over again.

He’s bothered by them.

And he doesn’t describe them in the way that scale is used today.

He talks about them as bums who panhandle for smoke, which is a kind of cooking sherry laced, as he calls it, with the cheapest and foulest whiskey to be had.

And that they bother people for a buck for a cup of coffee.

And he says that the bums are mostly people from out of town, Boston most likely, always that New York-Boston reverie.

That sounds right.

You know, I’m betting that you have all kinds of great slang that you could share with us in a future call.

I really hope you’ll call back and bring us more.

Amount of kind of jargon and kind of weirdly specific terms to go through but I’ll have to call back when I have another good one.

Oh yeah, please do. Thank you so much for sharing your background and it sounds like you’re a good digger when it comes to word research, so keep at it.

Yeah, will do. Thanks.

All right, take care now. Thanks for calling. Bye-bye.

Sure thing. Bye.