the verb SKUNK in cribbage (revival)

[Lynne Murphy]

All of these instances of _skunk_ meaning 'to trounce an opponent' seem to
be the 'defeat soundly' sense that is present in dictionaries (usually with
quotations related to physical sports).  It may be that that term is more
commonly used with some card games than with others, but my original point
(before the revival) had been that there are a lot of (sometimes common)
senses of _skunk_ that aren't in dictionaries.  The nominal use reported
here wrt to cribbage is probably one of them, but the verb sense doesn't
strike me as anything new/unnoticed.

For what it's worth, when playing Hand and Foot (a variation of canasta),
my family always says that the skunked loser is 'caught with his/her pants
down'.  Not sure how that phrase got stuck with that game and not others...

Lynne

--On Monday, November 20, 2006 4:47 pm -0500 Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
wrote:

> In Ping-Pong, as I learned it in Saint Louis, a player is "skunked,"
> and automatically loses the game, when the score reaches 7-0 in favor
> of his opponent. There's another term, "whitewashed," used to describe
> the situation in which a player scores 15 before his opponent scores
> 7. Again, the player on the short end of the score automatically
> loses.
>
> WRT hearts, what you describe is what I know as "shooting the moon."
>
> WRT to cribbage, when one player pegs out before his opponent turns
> the first corner, the opponent is said to have been "left in the
> lurch."
>
> In whist, the pair that turns the first seven tricks is said to
> "skunk" the other pair.
>
> -Wilson
>
>
>
> On 11/20/06, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> ----------------------- Sender:       American Dialect Society
>> <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
>> Subject:      Re: the verb SKUNK in cribbage (revival)
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> -------
>>
>> And in my earlier days, in the Northeast -- Boston, at least.
>>
>> Isn't "skunk" also used in some card games?  Perhaps hearts, when one
>> player takes all the points, and thereby wins.  A half-hearted Google
>> search also showed up this, at
>> http://www.dolphincovegames.com/dcgs/games/euchre/gloss.php, about
>> euchre:  "to win a game with the opponent having scored zero points;
>> to shut out an opponent: Also whitewash"
>>
>> Joel
>>
>> At 11/20/2006 10:13 AM, you wrote:
>> > This use of SKUNK is alive and well in Minnesota as well.  I have
>> > know of it all
>> > my cribbage-playing life. In fact, some of the cribbage boards on
>> > which I played
>> > during college in Minneapolis had an actual line drawn on them to
>> > make the SKUNK
>> > even clearer. It is the ultimate humiliation to any cribbage player
>> > (except for
>> > the dreaded DOUBLE-SKUNK).
>> >
>> > John M. Spartz -- MN(31), IN(3)
>> > __________________________________________
>> >
>> > ------------------------------------------------------------
>> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>
> --
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -----
> -Sam Clemens



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer and Head of Department
Linguistics and English Language
Arts B135
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org