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A PERSNICKETY ETYMOLOGY

11/4/2018

3 Comments

 
Persnickety is a wonderfully whimsical adjective that implies someone is obsessing over detail too much, often over a trivial matter. Now let's obsess over the details of its etymology! There are multiple accounts of its origins, and none of them are backed up too well. All etymologists agree that it was first coined in 1889, likely from the previous form pernickety, which held the same meaning and probably came into English circa 1800. One theory traces this to a Scots word, pernicky, but that could just be a cognate. Another school of thought is that pernickety is just a child's way of saying particular, and that a persnickety is just very particular over minutiae. Others say that -nick could be from knick-knack or that per- could be from a Latin prefix meaning "thoroughly", but no one is sure at all. It's all very mysterious. Persnickety is at its highest usage ever, but attestations of pernickety have been dropping since its peak in the mid-1900s.
3 Comments
Rick Bosan
9/23/2020 08:56:23 am

Thank you.

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Cheri Lynn Reeves link
10/26/2020 06:32:47 pm

I have always loved this word and used it in my business name when I started my freelance editorial business. Somehow I had expected it to be older than Victorian times. Thanks for the info!

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Kirsten Josefsen
6/22/2022 07:13:12 am

There is a Danish word with the exact same meaning as the English pernickety,
It is: pernitten (adjective)
and pernittengryn (noun)
therefore what I think is that the word is much older - perhaps it came to England with the vikings.
It is said that the Danish version means Per - the name of af man - nitten . menas nineteen - gryn - menas grains.
Per had lent a bowl of grain to someone and when that person returned the loan Per counted the grains and found that is was ninetten grains short.

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    AUTHOR

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    Hello! I'm Adam Aleksic. I have a linguistics degree from Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote my thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy traveling, trivia, philosophy, board games, conlanging, and art history. 

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