People remember how their neighbors act toward them and others. Particularly if you live in a village, you know who’s generous and kind, and you also know who’s a tightwad. In the case of the scrooge, you might also call them a nithing, a shut-purse, a chinch, a hayne, a nigon, or a pinchbeck.
Well, to be clear, you might not call them some of those today — but the 1400s and 1500s seem to have been a golden age of misers, at least etymologically; back then all of those adjectives were readily available.
“Pinchbeck” is an interesting one. Nobody is quite sure where it came from — maybe it’s a combination of “pinch” (like you’re pinching your purse shut) and “back” (like you’re backing away from paying for something). That, by the way, is not an officially sanctioned etymological theory. But back in 1538, Thomas Elyot published “The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot” (probably a vanity press, right?), and included this: “Addicion Aridus homo, a drye felowe, of whom no thynge may be goten: som do call hym, a pelt, or a pynchebeke.”
The word “pelt”, by the way, used to mean either a pile of rubbish or someone dressed in clothes so ragged that they ought to be in the trash.
Anyway, one of the things that makes “pinchbeck” interesting is that it fell out of use after the 1600s, but then it came back again in the mid-1700s with a different meaning, and for a different reason. There was a fellow named Christopher Pinchbeck who lived from 1670 to 1732. He lived in London, and made watches. He also came up with a new metal alloy — it was mostly copper with some zinc mixed in, and it had the property — pretty useful to a watchmaker, you might imagine — that it looked almost identical to gold. I mean, you know, if you didn’t put the two right next to each other, of course…
But if you’re in the market for a watch, which was probably the iPhone of the 1700s — and you’re not in the “cost is no object” stratum of society — you might not generally be able to put a real gold watch side-by-side with one of Mr. Pinchbeck’s products. And since you’d be much better able to afford the Pinchbeck version, well, the watchmaker was a big success. Henry Fielding alluded to it in “Chambermaid” in 1734: “He said..that the Nobility and Gentry run so much into Pinchbeck, that he had not dispos’d of two Gold Watches this Month.”
Far from trying to hide the fact that his alloy wasn’t real gold, but looked like it, it seems that Pinchbeck made it a feature. Or at least his business did, in an ad from the November 29, 1732 issue of the Daily Post: “…the toys made of the late ingenious Mr. Pinchbeck’s curious metal..are now sold only by his son and sole executor, Mr. Edward Pinchbeck.”
It’s not clear whether the Pinchbeck clan had any financial interest in the many items made out of the metal that came to be called “Pinchbeck.” But at the very least, they had succeeded in reintroducing “pinchbeck” into English. By the 1800s “pinchbeck” not only meant the actual metal, but anything that looked valuable but actually wasn’t: “How would not such a romance by the great master have contrasted with Bulwer’s pinchbeck and frippery.” That’s from the Southern Literary Messenger in 1847 — and given the date, it’s even possible that the “Bulwer” in the citation might refer to Edward Bulwer-Lytton of “it was a dark and stormy night” fame.
“Pinchbeck” is still in use to this day — but it’s outlived its figurative meaning, and is now used to refer specifically to items — such as antiques, which are now probably much more valuable than they were originally — made out of an alloy that’s mostly copper with some zinc mixed in. They say it kinda looks like gold.
