Did people typically refer to contemptible people as “finks” back in the old timey days?
Background:
Saw the movie “Requiem for a Heavyweight” again recently. In one scene, one of the characters (Rooney, I think) is highly upset, and calls (possibly Gleason) someone something like a “dirty, rotten fink!” Seems like in the 1930s “Taxi” movie with James Cagney, he referred to some of the competition as “finks,” also. “Fink” can mean “informer,” but that was not the meaning from these references, but it seemed to have been just an intensive pejorative in these cases.
I’m assuming that the Hays Code would have limited the colorfulness of epithets, at least in the case of “Requiem,” but in normal real life in the 1940s – 1950s, if a person were recounting a story involving some bad guy or otherwise contemptible person, would they have referred to that person as a “fink” (where today, it might be MFer or SOB)?
I remember this being used as a pejorative noun that did not imply being an informant during the 60s. I think Steve Allen used the word fairly often on his show.
Going through Pennsylvania Dutcvh country you comonly come across references to “finks” – it’s Penn Dutch dialect version of “finch”, the bird. In art, you’ve got “Distlefinks” = “Thistle Finches”. My own aunt, of Polish background, used to call her pet finches “finks”. I suspect that’s the German pronunciation, and it may have bled over into Poland.
So I can easily see the development as informer > bird who “sings” > both “stool pigeon” and “fink = finch”. That’s consistent with both what the OP and SDT say about “informer”.
To be frank, I can’t recall earlier uses of the term. I haven’t seen the Cagney movie, but I can’t recall any pre-1950s uses of the term, and certainly nothing before the turn of the century.
The term “Fink” definitely got a boost in the early sixties as a non-informer pejorative from Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s cartoon image of the “Rat Fink” that he introduced in the 1950s, and was brought into prominence be cartoons and later plastic models
And then Allen Sherman released his parody “Ratt Fink” to the tune of “Ragg Mopp” in 1963:
AFAIK, this was the first “non-informer” use of “fink”, which would’ve been later than the OP suggests.
As kids in the late 50’s and throughout the 60’s, we knew the “technical” definition of fink as an informant, but almost always used it as a general pejorative.
The OED says the origin is unknown. Earliest cite is from 1903:
If the 4th reference is correct (and The American Mercury was run by H.L. Mencken, who knew his language and who was 12, and an avid reader when the Homestead Strike occurred), the original reference meant “strikebreaker.” Whether his proposed etymology is correct or not is undetermined, but that change from “Pink” to “Fink” neatly follows Grimm’s Law, so is quite possible.
Taxi also capitalized on Cagney’s fluency in Yiddish; the slang dictionary defines it as an “informer or any untrustworth, reprehensible person” and confirms CalMeacham’s “German word for finch,” going on to say that it was
I’m assuming that was from the 1989 OED or using fink as a verb.
There’s an earlier cite from George Ade–1894–“Everybody that’s on to him says he’s a fink…You know what I mean, he’s a stiff, a skate. He drinks and never come up. He’s always layin’ to make a touch, too.” This from the Random House Dic. of American Slang, by Jon Lighter. Mr. Lighter suggest there is very little support for the Pinkerton possibility.
In fact, Mr. Lighter supports the German origins proposed by CalMeacham above.
Yeah, rat was to fink then what it is now to bastard - ratfink / ratbastard.
And don’t forget Rat Fink, Mad Magazine’s drag racer. There’s a whole Google page on him here. You could acually buy models of him. I did pencil drawings of Rat Fink in some of his hot rods when I was fourteen and mailed one to my divorced mother living in California. She mailed it back a few years ago…thought I’d get a kick out of how dorky I was then.
Rat Fink was the brainchild of “Big Daddy” Ed Roth, not Mad Magazine. There was some artisitic similarities to the art of Don Martin, who did appear in Mad Magazine.
I wasn’t really looking for the etymology or derivation of “fink,” but its use in non-pop-culture conversation. Say, it’s 1960, and two guys are having drinks after work, and one of them says “That low-down, double-crossing fink grabbed my wife’s ass!” or That low-down, double-crossing fink got the job I applied for." I can see how “fink” was a safe pejorative for Hays Code movies, but I wonder about its actual use in real life, as opposed to other available epithets, like “SOB” and “bastard.”
