Hodgepodge 309/365 - Words (Skeevy)

You know how sometimes you encounter a word, and then it shows up again—and again—and again? That's happened to me this week with skeevy, a completely new word to me.

On Thursday, I was looking something up on Merriam-Webster
(m-w.com), which on the right side of the page lists a handful of "trending words." At the top of the current list was skeevy. I saw and noted it, then continued on to whatever word I was headed for.

A Google-image search for the word
got me these skeevy photos

A short while later, I checked the New York Times, as I am wont to do when avoiding work, and there was a story called "The 1990s Gave Us the Trump Teens." An intriguing title, so I clicked on it. The story's thesis might be contained in this sentence: "A Trump presidency would never have been possible had the ’90s not normalized new depths of voyeurism, mudslinging and hardball politics." And farther on, there was this one: "Had America not absorbed the sheer skeeviness of that decade, how else would it have become comfortable electing a thrice-married man who ran beauty contests and graced casinos, one of them with a strip club, with his name—a man accused of a string of unwanted sexual advances and assaults (all of which he denied)?"

Well, indeed. But my point here is, I actually saw skeevy (or its nominal form) in print, just after having spotted the unfamiliar word at Merriam-Webster. Of course, it was trending because of this article: other readers wanted to know what it meant.

And what does it mean? Morally or physically repulsive; unpleasant, squalid, distasteful.

Yeah.

Then last night at dinner, Rachel described something as "skeevy." Wait, whoa: is this a common word that I've missed all this time?

The word has only been used once to date in the New York Times print edition, and one other time in a NYT blog, in a movie review. So I'm gonna say no, it's not super common. But Rachel seemed surprised that I didn't know the term. Maybe it's common in Chicago? 

It may have started life in the 1970s as a South Philly slang term, from the Italian schifo (“disgust”) and schifare (“to sicken, disgust”). It can be used as a verb too: "I skeeve"—i.e., that disgusts me.

Most recently (i.e., just now), while looking at a list of the ten "essential" Steely Dan songs (on the sad occasion of Walter Becker's death, at age 67), I saw the word in a description of "Hey Nineteen" from the 1980 album Gaucho: "Gaucho is essentially a concept record about staying too long at the fair, and this track is its skeevy centerpiece. Steely Dan protagonists don't come much more hilariously pathetic than the aging dude from this leisurely funk tune, who's putting the moves on a 19-year-old. He brags about his frat exploits and tries to set the mood with some Aretha, only to find that his companion 'don't remember the Queen of Soul.' The song builds to perhaps the ultimate yacht-rock refrain, which many singing it back to the band live don't seem to realize is pure satire: 'The Cuervo Gold / The fine Colombian / Make tonight a wonderful thing.'"

Here. I know you want to hear the tune now:

And then there's what some consider Steely Dan's masterpiece, "Deacon Blues." The protagonist here is not skeevy. Rather, he's "a triple-L loser—an L-L-L Loser. It’s not so much about a guy who achieves his dream but about a broken dream of a broken man living a broken life," Becker said in a Wall Street Journal interview in 2015. "'Deacon Blues' was special for me. It’s the only time I remember mixing a record all day and, when the mix was done, feeling like I wanted to hear it over and over again. It was the comprehensive sound of the thing: the song itself, its character, the way the instruments sounded and the way Tom Scott’s tight horn arrangement fit in."

I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I played too long.

RIP Walter Becker.