Talk:skinny

naked or nude?

i dont think this works. theres no other context where skinny is used to mean nude. also, skinny can not be switched with any synonym in that context. "nude dipping"? "naked dipping"? skinny-dipping is a colloquialism based on skin-diving. Vinithehat 16:18, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

• What about used in this context: "she was in her skinnies"? DB 18:10, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

RFV discussion

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Rfv-sense: naked, nude. Is this ever used outside of skinny dipping? There's no reason to think the skinny in skinny dipping means 'nude', as it's an idiom. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:23, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

I have added a noun sense nakedness, which is mostly found as in the skinny. I have also added quotations for the adjective in question, but only in the construction "[swim] skinny". DCDuring TALK 17:38, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

Looks good, although I think "take our clothes oft" is a scanno for "take our clothes off. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:48, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

Is this a separate etymology, {{back-form}}?​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:12, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

I don't know. If it is, the noun sense (deprecated template usage) skinny (c. WWII) might be from the same source. It's no semantic stretch, so it could have been lurking for quite some time as a secondary sense. "Resembling skin" was apparently the original sense. In playground team summer sports, teams are often "shirts" and "skins". Skin-diving has the same "zero-clothing" metaphor for "skin". DCDuring TALK 20:07, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

I found one quote.

• 1998 Meanjin, Volume 57, Issues 3-4, University of Melbourne, p571

  He stood there, skinny in his underpants, while she held the dress against his body. Then he stepped into it, and she buttoned him up at the back.

However, it's still ambiguous. Was he "naked" in his underpants, or "thin/slim" in his underpants? In any case, he's not completely naked. Ackatsis 04:53, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

Here's another one, this time less ambiguous.

• 1994 Geoffrey Atheling Wagner, A singular passion: a novel, Baskerville Publishers, p200

  When I went in again, the desirable alien was in bed with eyelids closed [...], obviously sleeping skinny, to employ her own term for it.

Ackatsis 04:56, 25 July 2010 (UTC)
Passes. Mglovesfun (talk) 07:59, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Striking per Mglovesfun. —Ruakh_TALK 16:59, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Etymology

I think it would be good if we had information on this. For example, how 'skinny' relates to nudity is easily understood: people are baring skin, thus projecting a skin-ny attribute. One thing that has confused me is how this term came to mean lean/slender/thin etc. It is people with greater bulk (muscle or fat) who have more skin to cover all that tissue. Slender people tend to have less skin because they have less body mass to cover up. It's almost counter-intuitive. Does anyone have any information on how long people have been using it this way? I'm very interested in tracking down the etymological origins. DB 18:10, 13 June 2011 (UTC)