May 10, 1999

hinky, hincty

I recently heard the word "hinky" on an old Dragnet episode and remembered the word used in several James Ellroy novels. Yet, the word cannot be found in the several dictionaries I have searched. What is the origin, meaning and is it only used in reference to crime?

There are two related words involved here, and the origin of neither one is known.

The first word is hincty, found in various spellings. First recorded in the 1920s, hincty has two distinct senses. The first is found almost exclusively in Black English, and means 'snobbish; haughty; conceited; aloof; fastidious'. Example: "She wasn't a bit hinkty like so many folks when they're light-complexioned and up in the money" (Langston Hughes, Ways of White Folks, 1934). This word is of unknown origin.

The second sense is apparently the one you have in mind: 'wary or extremely cautious; feeling suspicion', a sense used chiefly by the police and members of the criminal underworld. This also dates from the 1920s, but was never very common.

The second word is your hinky. This seems to be a variant of hincty, with the medial -t- lost for ease of pronunciation. Hinky is extremely rare in the sense 'snobbish', but it quite common as a police and underworld term for 'wary', and hence 'nervous or jumpy'. The word is often found in crime novels. It is first recorded in the 1950s, though in reference to the 1940s; as with many such words, it is quite likely that it was in long use but went unrecorded owing to the primarily oral nature of the subcultures in which it was used.

There are a few related terms. In Black English hincty is used as a noun in reference to a hinkty person, a sense alleged to date from the 1930s. As a police and underworld term, hinky can also mean 'arousing suspicion' (in English, suspicious can mean both 'feeling suspicion' and 'arousing suspicion', so we can separate hinky into both meanings as well).