Ask Sue-belinda

THANK you to Carl, whose email sent me scurrying down a range of rabbit holes in pursuit of an answer!

Carl has an apprentice and while he’s very happy with the young bloke, his work ethic and his curiosity, he can’t help but wonder if anyone talked to him growing up. Carl reckons that about 20 times a day, his apprentice asks what the expression he’s just used means.

With Carl’s permission, I’ll quote: “Now Sue-belinda, every bloke in the world wants to think he’s so smart, that he’s the only man in the room making sense, but this young one just must not have had anyone to talk to, at least anyone whose conversation is filled with old expressions. He asks me about just about everything that comes out of my mouth. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that he asks questions, but he asks a lot. Thank heavens I’ve been reading your column forever and can explain most, but today I muttered something about some bloke on the phone making a flimsy excuse and no sooner was it out of my mouth than he pounced on it asking what ‘flimsy’ means. So, over to you, please to help me out.”

As soon as I read the email, my mind wandered to the armed services’ use of “flimsy” to describe records made on paper so thin that you could see straight through it – a little like tissue paper or for those of you old enough to remember, the lunch paper Mum used to wrap sandwiches in before the advent of plastic wrap and sandwich bags.

I wondered if “flimsy” might not relate to “film” – yes I know the letters are swapped around, but it’s not the first time that’s happened in the history of a word’s life. Then I thought of the “flimflam” man. No, I’m not that old, these shifty characters were around from at least the 1700s. These men were hornswogglers, bamboozlers, or if you’d prefer I wrote in more mundane tones, they were deception artists. If you’ve ever watched an old western movie, you may have seen the salesman who drives his wagon into town and sells some potion to cure all ills. You might know him as a “snake oil salesman”.

Right, so having popped in and out of a series of rabbit holes, I now found myself exploring the Old Norse language and there, sure enough, was the word “flim”, which means “mockery”. This word was transported into English between 793 and 1266 when Scandinavian Vikings, who were mostly from Norway, decided to travel to Scotland. (I’ll pause here for a moment to explain that the word “Viking” is still not completely understood. There is an expression – “fara í Viking” – which is thought to have meant

“go on a Viking”, which may be associated with raids. Some think that “Viking” meant “king of the bays”, but this may have been an allusion to their prowess in bringing their longboats to shore and then safely setting back out to sea on conclusion of their raid. There is also the Old Norse word “vikingr” meaning a “dwelling place” from “vik”, meaning “creek”. So it’s possible that when the Scots asked where these invaders had come from, they just told them basically that they’d come from home.

I digressed – these rabbit holes are completely enticing and enchanting. Anyway, there is a period around the late 8th century right up to the 15th century in which Norse settlers, mainly Norwegians, began to migrate to the Northern Isles of Scotland, a place known to the Norse as the Norðreyjar. This area was loosely described at the time as “Scandinavian Scotland” and like many Australians, it’s a part of the world to which I can trace my own roots. Now we have “flim” as a Norse word meaning “mockery”, or “to mock or lampoon”, which embedded itself in the Scottish language and made its way south into English. By the early 1500s, it was established in English as a noun. Roll on to 1538 and there is a written record of the noun “flimflam” being used to describe a person of “deceitful tongue”. This doubling up of words – okey dokey, pitter patter, silly billy and so on are known as “reduplication”, where the sound of the first word is so pleasing, another word is added in a similar vein. The second word rarely carried meaning or added to the meaning of the first. “Flam” for example has no meaning other than when accompanied by a leading “flim”. It settled into the language comfortably and surviving court documents of the day use the word often. By 1660, “flimflam” was being used as a verb – to flimflam someone out of their savings was a crime that saw those found guilty sent to jail, directly to jail.

Curiously enough, the history of the word flimflam as explored by the BBC Language Unit finds it to be on the rise in modern use and this may be attributable to My Little Pony – a children’s TV series in which the Flim Flam Brothers sing and include the term.

Right! We’ve now established how “flim” made its progress from the western coast of Norway to Scotland along with the Vikings. We’ve discovered how “flim” became “flimflam” and when this noun transitioned into being a verb, but what of “flimsy”?

Around 1702, the date on which the word first appears in a newspaper, the noun that became a verb, suddenly made its debut as an adjective and rather than becoming “flimflamish” or some other adjective-forming suffix being added, it was reduced back to flim and the adjective forming suffix ‘y’ was added to make “flimy”. It is unclear when or why flimy became flimsy, but it may have been for the same reason “whimy” became “whimsy” – it sounded better. Flimsy became an adjective to describe something that was lacking in strength or durability, made using inferior skills or materials or even having little worth, intrinsic or physical value or plausibility.

There you have it Carl. The potted history of “flimsy”. Can’t wait to hear about the next question your apprentice asks!