"fellow" = "A black man"; also "secesh' noun & adj. 1862; and "nub" 1728

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:11 PM -0400 4/4/11, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
>What are you talking about? I call it the little finger; I call it the
>pinky. I have NEVER called it the pinky finger.
>
>DanG

I've called it both "pinky" and "pinky finger",
but I was just wondering what the derivation was.
Turns out not *all* while folk call them either
of the above.  These terms spelled as such are
apparently unknown in British English, at least
enough not to have earned a listing in the OED.
But the "pinkie" is there, as an originally
Scottish term for the little finger or little toe,
with etymology uncertain but...

"Origin uncertain. Perhaps compare early modern
Dutch pinck, pink (1599; Dutch pink), West
Frisian pink, pinke, both in sense 'little
finger', and Dutch pink, Ýpinck (Middle Dutch
pinck, pynk, earliest in compounds), West Frisian
pink, pinke, both in sense 'young bull or heifer,
yearling'. Although they share the semantic
element of smallness, it is unclear whether these
two groups are etymologically related; they are
probably all ultimately of imitative origin.
Perhaps further related to pink v.2 or its
probable Dutch etymon."

I always love the "of imitative origin" when it's
totally unclear what exactly it's imitative of.

Then there's the apparently unrelated
"pink"-the-color--origin even more unknown.

LH

>
>On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 8:31 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>  -----------------------
>>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>>  Subject:      Re: "fellow" = "A black man"; also "secesh' noun & adj. 1862;
>>  and
>>               "nub" 1728
>>
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  A friend of mine
>>  with what I'm assuming to be similar nubs on her little fingers - uh,
>>  by "little fingers" I mean what white folk call "pinky fingers," ...
>
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