Around the mid 1600s somebody in Scotland thought it would be fun to organize a group into two teams, get a ball, give everybody a curved stick to hit the ball with, and make a game of it. It was a little like field hockey, but that’s not what they called it. What they did call it was “shinny.” It’s not entirely clear where that name came from; it might be derived from the Gaelic word “sinteag” (a leap), or it might come from “shin ye,” which supposedly was something the players yelled during the game. Since they were running around a field close together waving sticks at a ball on the ground, if they really did yell “shin ye” it probably had something to do with smacking each other in the legs with their sticks.
People kept playing the game, though, and in another century the name had evolved to “shinty.” Around the same time the word “shinty” (or “shindy”) also meant a party, particularly a raucous one including dancing. It’s possible that the game tended to be the lead-in to a big party, but nobody seems to know for sure.
Another century later, in the mid-1800s, some people who knew the word “shindy” (which seems to have been gradually becoming the preferred spelling) emigrated to North America and brought the word with them. They had parties in the US too, of course, and the parties included dancing. And that’s where a bit of a mystery arises. Nowadays a big party is often called a “shindig.” The mystery is whether “shindig” is a further evolution of “shindy,” or if it refers to an accidental kick in the shin while dancing — very much like what probably happened in the original game, but without the sticks. At this point it’s likely impossible to know the answer.
But there is an answer to where the word “shin” came from. It has meant the lower front part of your leg (more technically the front edge of the tibia) for a very long time. In Old English it was “scinu,” which probably came from the Old High German word “scina” (needle). That developed into the modern German word “shienbien” (shinbone), and there is a similar word in Dutch (scheen). They all seem to come from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root “skei,” although that PIE word meant “to split.” That root is also the source of the verb “shed” (but not the “shed” that means a storage building). “Shed” also made its way from Proto-Indo-European through ancient German (skaithan), Old Saxon (“skethan”), Old Frisian (“sketha”) and so forth.
“Frisian,” by the way, is nowadays a language with several dialects (West Frisian, North Frisian, and Saterland Frisian, at least) that’s spoken by about half a million people who live on the coast of the North Sea in Germany and the Netherlands. Frisian is closely related to English (or the “Anglic languages,” as linguists would say), but that kind of “closely related” just has to do with language origins and influences; Frisian and English speakers can’t understand each other. Anyway, linguistically the set of related languages are called the “Anglo-Frisian languages,” including all the historic varieties of English (old, middle, and modern), Scots (there are historical varieties of that language too), and even Yola and Fingallian, two extinct languages from Ireland — not to mention Ingvaeonic, a contemporary of Old English also called “North Sea Germanic.” Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist and geographer from the first century CE, also mentioned the Ingaevones, a group of tribes in the western part of what is now Germany. He didn’t think to record whether they were known for playing a game that involved running around trying to hit a ball with sticks, though. They either kept that secret or didn’t even think of it for another sixteen hundred years.
