It’s getting to be the time of year when ice skating jumps quite a bit in popularity (that jump, obviously, would be an axel). To go ice skating you need skates. Unless, of course, you’re Snoopy the beagle in A Charlie Brown Christmas, where he manages to skate better than any of the kids just using his surprisingly large, flat, and two-dimensional feet!
But when you’re talking about skates, don’t forget that there are, in fact, three different kinds of skates. I’m not talking about ice skates, roller skates, and …well, another kind, if there is one. What I mean is that there are three different “skate” words in English. There’s the word that means the apparatus you wear on your feet, then there’s a kind of fish called a skate, and the third “skate” is the one that’s part of “cheapskate.”
The oldest version of “skate” — and it’s the oldest by several centuries — is the fish. It comes from the Old Norwegian word “skata,” which meant (and still means) a flat fish that stays near the sea bottom. This version of “skate” entered English in the mid 1300s, and has pretty much just lurked down near the bottom of the language ever since.
The word for the things you wear on your feet comes from the Dutch word “schaats,” which in turn was adopted from the Old French word “escache” that meant “scratch”. My guess is that skates were called something else before that, because I think you’d have to see them in use to get the idea that they’re “scratching” the ice. This version of “skate” glided into English in the middle of the 1600s, establishing the beginning of a rhythm that played out when the third version of “skate” appeared around 1900. At this rate, we can look forward to another “skate” sometime around the year 2200.
The third version of “skate” originally meant an old, worn-out horse. It appeared in both Rudyard Kipling’s late work (“This yaller~backed skate comes to our pastur”) and in Ernest Hemingway’s early work (“They’d kill that bunch of skates for their hides and hoofs up at Paris.”) Nobody knows where this third “skate” word came from. But it wasn’t long at all before it began to be applied to people as well as horses. At first it was used alone to mean a generally undesirable sort of fellow: “Offered me a hundred dollars a week, the skate!” Right away it began to be paired with “cheap:” “Any one who smokes that kind of cigarettes is a cheap skate.”
It took a while for “cheap skate” to become the single compound word “cheapskate,” but by the 1950s the ice had pretty much set. “Skate” is still very occasionally used by itself, as Harold Pinter did in 1960: “The filthy skate, an old man like me.” By now, though, “skate” by itself has been mostly forgotten, so the only third sort of skate we’re left with is the cheap kind. It figures — a market economy is often little more than a race to the bottom — where you’d find those flat fish still swimming around, oblivious to anybody scratching the ice up at the surface.
