Skin In The Game

[Joel S. Berson]

At 4/16/2007 11:04 PM, sagehen wrote:
>  I seem to have lost the first posts on this thread.  I remember waiting to
>see when someone would mention that "skin" was at one time a term for  a
>bill.  I wasn't sure which denomination.  OED yields one dollar from M20.
>Since "a skin in the game" seems pretty transparent, I'm wondering what the
>original question was?
>AM

For the benefit of sagehen, and anyone else who thought "a skin in
the game" was not transparent:

The original message did not actually ask a question.  On 15 Apr 2007
Doug Harris 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."
Doug continued by complaining about
>the number of sports terms, FAR too often unexplained, or
>self-evident, sneaking into 'general speak' ... Skin in the game
smacks of violence, to one's own body or someone else's. ...

And I repeat my thoughts about skin being simply money:

>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

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