Skin In The Gane

[Joel S. Berson]

Safire may have thought "The skin in this case is
a synecdoche for the self, much as “head” stands
for cattle and “sail” for ships. The game is the
investment, commitment or gamble being
undertaken."  But my first association is money
-- a much more pertinent concept in the context of taxes; and I find in OED2:

skin (n) 1.c. slang. (See quots.)
    1785 Grose Dict. Vulgar T., Skins, a
tanner.  a1790 H. T. Potter New Dict. Cant &
Flash (1795) 53 Skin, a purse.  1812 J. H. Vaux
Flash Dict., Skin, a purse, a money bag.  [Hence
in later slang Dicts.]   1821 D. Haggart Life 15
Young McGuire had taken some skins with a few
shillings in each.  1856 Mayhew Gt. World London
iii. (Farmer), Abstracting skins from gentlemen's
pockets.  1902 S. Clapin New Dict. Americanisms
365 Skin.+ A purse; a pocket-book.  1935 A. J.
Pollock Underworld Speaks 107/1 Skin, a
pocketbook or wallet.  1936 J. Curtis Gilt Kid
xii. 137 Proper jobs I mean. Not nicking skins
from blokes what are lit up.  1955 D. W. Maurer
in Publ. Amer. Dialect Soc. xxiv. 114 Synonymous
terms [of billfold] are hide, skin, or poke.

and

2.b. U.S. slang. A dollar.
    1930 [see by prep. 33e].   1950 [see lip n.
3d].   1976 R. B. Parker Promised Land xx. 121, I
got a buyer with about a hundred thousand dollars+a hundred thousand skins.

and

10. b. U.S. slang. = skinflint.
    1900 Ade More Fables 30 Some of the
Folks+used to say that Henry was a Skin, and was
too Stingy to give his Family enough to eat.

As for golf's "skins game", while Safire has his
authorities, isn't the amount of money won in
each match referred to as "[so many] skins"?

Although I suppose this may be support for Safire's synecdoche:

10.c. Without contemptuous implications: a person
(of a specified kind). Chiefly Anglo-Ir.
    1914 Joyce Dubliners 152 Ah, poor Joe is a
decent skin.  1939 ‘F. O'Brien’ At Swim-Two-Birds
166 A decent skin if ever there was one, said
Slug with warmth, a man that didn't stint the
porter.  1958 B. Behan Borstal Boy iii. 258 These
were lies+that Cragg was muttering about the
Colonel, who wasn't a bad old skin at all,+since
he got to know us.  Ibid. 266 He seemed a decent
old skin.  1966 F. Shaw et al. Lern Yerself
Scouse 22 Ee's a good skin, he is an agreeable fellow.

Joel

At 4/15/2007 06:02 PM, you wrote:
>Sorry, here's a link that doesn't require TimesSelect access:
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/magazine/17wwln_safire.html?ei=5090&en=97be92b89aa8baa7&ex=1316145600&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1158491211-kZz5B+we6jC05MU5Z1FFEA
>
>
>On 4/15/07, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
>>Safire investigated "skin in the game" in an On Language column last year:
>>
>>http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F40C12FE3E550C748DDDA00894DE404482
>>
>>
>>
>>On 4/15/07, Doug Harris <cats22 at frontiernet.net> wrote:
>> >
>> > From today's LA Times, in an article re the shrinking number of people
>> > paying US income tax:
>> >
>> > "Many people would think if you are a
>> citizen, you ought to have skin in the
>> > game, and we have more and more people with
>> no skin in the game," said Scott
>> > Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation, a
>> nonpartisan, conservative-leaning
>> > research group. "From a social perspective, we ought to be concerned about
>> > that."
>> >
>> > I am not really interested in sports, and I
>> make no attempt to keep current
>> > on sports terms or clichés. But I have noticed with some alarm (!) a
>> > creeping increase, over the past couple of
>> decades, in the number of sports
>> > terms, FAR too often unexplained, or self-evident, sneaking into 'general
>> > speak' -- the way most of us speak most of the time. 'Hat trick,' a term
>> > borrowed by hockey from soccer (where it actually _has_ a meaning), is a
>> > good example. 'Skin in the game' could be another.
>> > I certainly hope not. Hat trick sounds like
>> something fun. Skin in the game
>> > smacks of violence, to one's own body or someone else's. Perhaps sports
>> > speak inventors' creed should, like doctors, include the concept 'do no
>> > harm'.
>> > (the other) doug
>> >
>> > ------------------------------------------------------------
>> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>> >
>
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