Pylimitics

“Slim” is a more interesting word than you might think. It means “gracefully slender,” which is considered good. But its connotation, in other contexts, is not so good. “Chances of success are slim,” for example. The word comes from either Middle Dutch (slim) or Middle German (salem), where it meant slanted or crooked. The related word in modern German is “schlimm,” which means bad or wicked. Definitely no good connotations there. 

These days “slim” is an adjective, and it started appearing in English in the mid 1600s. But before that the word was a noun, and it meant a long stick or pole. It’s included in a dictionary from 1548, in fact. At about that time, the book Albions England used the noun “slim” in a negative way, disparaging a person as unmannered and “worse gated” (not sure what ‘gated’ means there). 

But back to Dutch — the modern word in Dutch is also “slim,” and it means “clever” — and in Dutch it can connote positive intelligence or sneaky slyness. In the early 1700s “slim” also meant “clever” in English — there’s an edition of Aesop’s Fables that describes a sneaky fox with the word “slim” rather than “sly,” and that meaning is still around today, although just barely; a dialect of English spoken in South Africa still includes the word “slimness” to mean craftiness or cunning.  

Just to add to the oddity of “slim,” it was also used in English to mean a worthless or despicable person. That sense of “slim” was also a noun, used in the 1500s, but has since completely disappeared. 

If nothing else, “slim” is a pretty versatile word. It can be a good thing or a bad thing, an adjective, a noun, and pretty recently, it’s even a verb. “Slimming,” meaning reducing in size, started appearing in the 1960s, and is still around. Why has one word been used in so many apparently unconnected ways over the centuries? The chances of ever knowing for sure are pretty slim.