a Yankee dime

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 06/22/2002 1:15:43 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
fukaya at USC.EDU writes:

> I came across a sentence like the following in a novel: "He didn't give a
> Yankee dime about anyone
>  but himself."  From the context, it apparently means, "He didn't care
about
> anyone but himself."
>  Since I couldn't find the expression in the dictionaries I have, I ran
some
> search on the Internet
>  and found out that the expression "a Yankee dime" means "a quick kiss on
the
> cheek" in the Southern
>  dialect, but nowhere could I find an explanation why it came to mean that.

A long-shot guess:  "Yankee dime" is a polite rendering of the old expression
"tinker's damn" (sometimes written "tinker's dam") as in "not worth a
tinker's damn", for which the OED2 gives an 1839 citation from, of all
people, Thoreau.  Another variation is "I don't give a tinker's damn" which
is close to your quote, with "Yankee dime" a phonetically plausible but
dubious bowdlerization.

Interestingly, I have heard "Continental damn", apparently a conflation of
"not worth a Continental" and "tinker's damn".

      James A. Landau