I guess I just don’t see the logical flow from “dead guy” to “poor tipper” or “treated inequitably”. The OED flippantly remarks that dead guys don’t tip well, but that seems like a lame copout to me. Do any of you have any thoughts or cites on this?
Nothing factual, more of a WAG, but I can see the noun “stiff” meaning “corpse” generalizing to other sorts of inactivity or failure to take an expected action, such as tipping. No great leap of logic needed.
No it doesn’t – it just offers that as a possibility. It’s a guess – and not a particularly good one, in my opinion. (I think it’s Douglas Harper’s contribution – there’s no attribution to the OED.) It seems that the idea is that it’s ultimately traceable back to the noun sense of “stiff,” meaning “corpse,” through the derived noun sense of “losing proposition,” as applied to racehorses. Maybe, but it seems like an unnecessary stretch.
To me, it makes more sense as derived from the use of the adjectival senses of “stiff.” ie; “rigid,” “not easily bent,” “difficult to overcome,” “stubborn,” etc.
The more usual use of the word, as “I know this one – he’s a stiff customer,” could easily have been “verbed” over time, due to the frequency of opportunity for expression and the tendency toward brevity that busy people display.
I should clarify, that by OED, i meant Online Etymology Dictionary. I did make it a link to the Online Etymology Dictionary to avoid this sort of confusion, apparently unsuccessfully so. Sorry for the confusion.
I did not consult the real OED, Oxford English Dictionary, in this matter.
Ha! I followed your links, and the possibility that “OED” might stand for something in addition to the OED escaped me entirely. (The front page’s "The basic sources of this work are <snip> “Oxford English Dictionary” reinforced that a bit.) :smack:
To answer the OP, I always thought stiffing someone as in not tipping came from stiff-arming as in pushing aside. Picture the faithful retainer standing with hand out being stiff-armed…
What is rigor mortis?
Rigor mortis is the state a body reaches when the oxygen supply to the muscles ceases but the cells continue to respire anaerobically (without oxygen). This causes lactic acid to build up, which affects the muscles causing stiffening - rigor mortis. Bodies become stiff after about three hours and remain that way for around 36 hours. Rigor mortis ceases as the body cells die, enzymes are released and the cells decompose.
I think everyone’s clear on why corpses are called “stiffs.” It’s less clear that the concept of “stiffing someone” has any connection at all to dead bodies.
Saying that we say non-tippers “stiff” people “because dead guys don’t tip either” is like suggesting that the noun sense of “burk” (stupid or disagreeable person) is probably derived from the verb sense of “burk” (murder) because it’s easy to entertain thoughts of doing away with such a person. It sounds sort of plausible, if you stretch a bit, but it’s dead wrong.
Both the “stiff-arm” theory and the possibility that the it’s a “verbing” of the adjectival sense of “not easily subdued; unyielding; stubborn; obstinate; pertinacious” are much more likely to be the correct origin of the term.