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Vocabulary geekery.
New words learned today: skittles, bar skittles, and skittle-sharp.
Nope, nothing to do with the bright colored candies called Skittles. Actually, it makes me wonder about the origin of the name for those, now.
Skittles was, evidently, a Victorian game oftentimes played in a bar or pub setting. It looked something like this when used as a parlor game, though in pubs it seems to have been played much like bowling, with an alley with the pins (skittles) at one end and a bowler at the other. Not sure about rules, but it must not be quite the same thing as ninepins, as I keep seeing the two mentioned distinctly from each other.
A skittle-sharp is much like any other sharp, like a card sharp, but with skittles. It was used thus in my latest bookstore find, a Wodehouse Blandings novel I hadn't yet read, Pigs Have Wings:
It was never an easy matter to disconcert the Hon. Galahad. For half a century nursemaids, governesses, tutors, schoolmasters, Oxford dons, bookmakers, three-card-trick men, jellied eel sellers, skittle sharps, racecourse touts and members of the metropolitan police force had tried to do it, and all had failed.
I do so love Wodehouse. It's the best repository of knowledge regarding 1920s-1930s slang, idioms, and culture one could ever want.
Nope, nothing to do with the bright colored candies called Skittles. Actually, it makes me wonder about the origin of the name for those, now.
Skittles was, evidently, a Victorian game oftentimes played in a bar or pub setting. It looked something like this when used as a parlor game, though in pubs it seems to have been played much like bowling, with an alley with the pins (skittles) at one end and a bowler at the other. Not sure about rules, but it must not be quite the same thing as ninepins, as I keep seeing the two mentioned distinctly from each other.
A skittle-sharp is much like any other sharp, like a card sharp, but with skittles. It was used thus in my latest bookstore find, a Wodehouse Blandings novel I hadn't yet read, Pigs Have Wings:
It was never an easy matter to disconcert the Hon. Galahad. For half a century nursemaids, governesses, tutors, schoolmasters, Oxford dons, bookmakers, three-card-trick men, jellied eel sellers, skittle sharps, racecourse touts and members of the metropolitan police force had tried to do it, and all had failed.
I do so love Wodehouse. It's the best repository of knowledge regarding 1920s-1930s slang, idioms, and culture one could ever want.
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