celebumom, skeezy

[Jonathon Green]

> I don't think the adjective "skeezy" applied to Britney Spears here has
> the
> sense "whorish" or "ready to trade sex for drugs",

I must admit that I had always believed that was _precisely_ the image
which Ms Spears and her handlers were currently promoting. Which may have
led me to assume that the whoreish meaning of skeezy applied here.

>
> Google Groups search shows hundreds of Usenet instances of "skeezy"
> beginning in about 1992, the word apparently generally equivalent to
> "sleazy", referring to skeezy [dirty] houses, skeezy clothes [including
> men's clothes], skeezy neighborhoods, skeezy lawyers/doctors, etc., etc.
> It
> seems that very few of the instances would permit interpretation as
> "whorish".


> I speculate that "skeezy" was available as a synonym for
> "scuzzy"/"sleazy"
> much earlier, well before the advent of the specifically whore-related
> sense (ca. 1980?), but even if it wasn't I think the usual current
> meaning
> is "scuzzy"/"sleazy".

All that said, and your point is wholly taken, such uses do seem to appear
_after_ the cites, which both come from rap/hip-hop and there are many
more, that I put forward. It may be a parallel development, but it might
also be possible that the non-sexual skeezy could be no more than a weak
adoption of the whoreish use, taken into wider applications.


>
> I wonder whence "skeeze" = "whore" [verb].

Indeed. The possible and by no means proven etymology that I offer in my
dict. runs: ''? SAmE _skeezicks_, a ‘mean, contemptible fellow’
(Bartlett); ? ult. Cornish _skeese_, to frisk about + _skicer_, a lamb
that kills itself through excess activity.'


But I am, as one almost invariably must be, open to all feasible
alternative suggestions.

JG