Card sharp versus card shark

[Michael Quinion]

Many thanks to Douglas Wilson for that further antedating of "shark".
I may now have also found an earlier example of "card sharp", though
it's open to interpretation.

It's in "Gabriel Conroy" by Bret Harte, dated 1856: "If I give ye
that twenty thousand, you'll throw it away in the first skin-game in
'Frisco, and hand it over to the first short-card sharp you'll meet!"

"Short-card sharp"? The hyphen isn't a misprint, since the same form
appears in a short story of Harte's in "Scribners Monthly" in May the
same year. So it's not a reference to an undersized gambler, but to a
sharp who played short cards.

Short-card games, if I've understood the term right, were those such
as poker, casino, and seven-up in which only part of the deck was
dealt in any game; it doesn't seem to be a reference to the common
gambler's trick of shaving certain cards to force the punter to draw
the one the gambler wants.


--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
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