We all know one around us.
You know, that friend who never wants to reach for his wallet to settle the bill.
Who always finds an excuse to leave before the bill arrives, or who hassled you to reimburse him for that coffee drunk together weeks ago.
And who has a knack for protesting loudly when it comes to settling their own debts.
This charming character is a
"
stingy
"
, a
"stingy person, often with meanness"
, indicates the CNRTL.
"Of a sordid and petty avarice
,
"
adds Le Larousse.
Pins dealer
But where does this
"stingy" come from
?
If we are not entirely sure of its origin, the Trésor de la langue française attests to the presence of a certain Pierre Le Pingre in the 15th century.
His surname would mean
“L'Espingle”
, a word used
“to metonymically designate a pin dealer”
.
This slang word,
"transmitted by the jargon of the itinerant haberdashery"
therefore designated
"a poor wretch"
, who sold pins.
This is how he endowed himself with the meaning
"stingy, miserly, by crossing with the image of the picker of pins"
.
According to Littré, it is more likely that pingre is "a nasalized form of Old French
pigre
(from Latin
piger
,
lazy
), which meant cowardly, miserable ”.
In
the 16th century, the
“stingers”
would have been a game. In any case, this is what one reads in the
Gargantua
by Rabelais, which uses this word to designate a
“game of bones”
.
We also have the old French
pinglière
, or “the one who manufactures or sells pins”.
A "poor", an "unfortunate"
The stingy was not always stingy, on the contrary!
In the 19th century, he was a devil without wealth.
In
Boise's
Universal Dictionary of the French Language
(1834), the stingy is also
"of bad face, cheeky, clever"
.
He then designates a
"usurer, miser"
from the Provençal word which meant
"poor, petty"
.
Child torture
We find another explanation of the word in the
Universal Encyclopedia
of the 19th century, defined by Édouard Fournier, specifies the Littré.
According to the man of letters, "
stingy"
would be borrowed from
"pin"
because
"The Jews were accused of driving stingers into the flesh of children.
From there, pingre passed to the Jews to designate a usurer. "
The thesaurus specifies that
"of this it would be necessary to provide proofs, that is to say texts",
and privileges the Latin etymology of the word.
