"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 21/02/18 (parsimonious, skinflints)

I have an e-mail from Anne Hunter in County of Durham, who says "parsimonious" is a greate word, but why are parsimonious people sometimes known as "skinflints"? I always think of Scrooge when I think of skinflints. It has slightly Dickensian feel to it, but actually it goes back a little bit earlier than that. I'll start with parsimonious. It is indeed a nice word. That goes back to the Romans, who gave us "parsitas", which meant sparing or thrifty or restrained, and if you look in the historical thesaurus which is nested with the wonderful Oxford English Dictionary, you'ii find lots of brilliant synonyms. So, tight-fisted speak for itself. Husbandly used to be an adjective meaning miserly, because a husband was the male of the houshold, in control of the finances. Scrimpy, and also squeezy, which is quite fun, or a pinchpenny, a skinflint also could be also a pinchpenny. But I'll go back to skinflint, and the idea of skinning a flint or a whittling down a flint stone for starting your fire until it was as thin as skin had, understandably, a lot more resonance in the 17th century than it does today. To skin a flint would be a very difficult task and would only be undertaken by somebody who really didn't want to go to the trouble of trying to find a new flint for their fire to keep warm. But it's been used as a metaphor for extrem miserliness for centuries, so at least the 1600s, when the first dictionaries of criminal slang were collected and published around that time. One of them defines a skinflint as "a gripping, close-feasted fellow". And it was popularised iby many works of drama and fiction. Not by Dickens, actually, but in the 18th century, a Skinflint with a capital S was a name of many stock characters that you'll find in dramas, plays, etc, who showed extreme greed. Lots of other phrases doing the same qualities, actually, and one of them was to skin a flea for its hide and tallow, so quite a similar idea. And in French they talk of "tender sur un oeuf", which is quite fun, which means to shave an egg. So again, it's almost... It's a near-impossible task, but if you were that miserly, it might just be one that you'd do.