"gink"?

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Wed Aug 31 15:48:51 UTC 2011


A traditional bawdy ballad "The Besom Maker" contains the two verses below; the narrator (since that's the term we've decided to adopt, faute de mieux) is a young (or, as it develops, at least still fertile) woman who makes besoms (brooms) out of broom or twigs.

http://www.mudcat.org/@displaysong.cfm?SongID=5896
[same lyrics as performed by Lucky Bags on their "Delight in Disorder" CD]


One day as I was roving, over the hills so high,
I met with a rakish squire, all with a rolling eye;
He tipp'd to me the wink, I wrote to him the tune,
I eased him of his gink, a-gathering of green broom.

One day as I was turning all to my native vale,
I met Jack Sprat the miller, he asked me to turn tail;
His mill I rattled round, I ground the grists so clean,
I eased him of his gink, a-gathering broom so green.

Now the second meaning of the gink of which she eases these gentlemen is clear (especially by the last verse, when the narrator is forced to give up her besom-selling for nursing), but there must be a first meaning (I assume = 'money, coin'), which I can't find in any lexicon…but one (see below).

The OED entry for _gink_ evidently involves a different lexical item:

Etymology:  Of obscure origin.
slang (orig. U.S.).

A fellow; a man. (Freq. pejorative.)
1910    Sat. Evening Post 22 Oct. 12/3,   I don't believe that all these ginks have got coin enough to support one good game.
[etc.]

Note the 'orig. U.S.', which is at variance with what I assume to be a local British sense within the song.

There's no entry for _gink_ in Farmer & Henley or in Wright's _English Dialect Dictionary_, and the web is no apparent help.  Neither the acronym adopted by the eponymous facebook group (GINK = 'Green Inclinations, No Kids') nor the first several entries on urbandictionary, either the OED sense ('man', derogatory) or various more specific slurs (gink = pejorative for someone of Indian descent) are particularly relevant.  But curiously, the 13th entry on ud (despite all the thumbs down) seems to be on target, although I can't parse the example provided:

13. gink 28 up, 47 down
Money, currency.
Dat nickel gots da GINK yun!

Any suggestions?  Do any actual lexicons contain this sense?

LH
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