The Weak Origin of Flimsy

Hello,

Possibly the worst accusation to somebody trying to find the origins of words is that they’re making a flimsy argument but today that’s exactly what I’m doing and I’m walking in big footsteps along the way.

I’m continuing my reading of Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary and I couldn’t help nodding in recognition when I read this entry for the word flimsy – “Of this word I know not any original, and suspect it to have crept into our language from the cant of manufacturers”. Cant in this case means jargon. He then, correctly, defines flimsy as being weak, feeble, without strength, and spiritless. Perhaps those manufacturers were accusing products from their competitors of being flimsy?

The tiny bird skull pictured below is an example of a flimsy structure – light so the bird can fly, but you could almost break it by breathing on it.

More than two centuries have passed since Johnson failed in his quest to find flimsy’s roots so I hoped some more recent sources could help me and they did, a little.

The Oxford English Dictionary confirms that its origins are unknown but added that the first use of the word they could find was in 1702. Johnson was writing only 53 years later and couldn’t find the roots. Etymology Online repeats this and adds it could have been drawn from film (a gauzy covering) with the addition of a -y suffix. The -sy suffix is pretty common – think of tipsy for example. They also added that saying somebody’s argument is flimsy dates to the 1750s, so that was a very new usage when Johnson was writing his dictionary.

A film or gauze is thin, weak, and easily broken. I agree that this could be the origin of the word but sadly there’s no proof yet, even two centuries later.

I’ve also been thinking about the idea of flimflam. This dates to the 1530s and describes nonsense talk or even a swindle. The flam part is just an echo, but could flim have given us flimsy? The dictionaries tell me it had Scandinavian roots as in Old Norse a flim was a lampoon. Maybe not close enough in meaning to give us flimsy but a clue all the same. Apologies for such a flimsy argument!

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

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