Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is Word Origins 83. The word origin today is Cheapskate. Okay. Let's take a look at the note. If we say someone is a cheapskate, he is thought to be a stingy person that does not like to spend money. Okay. Good. Let's continue. The origin of cheapskate does not have anything to do with ice skates or rollerskates or any type of skates and has nothing to do with them being on sale or being cheap or anything like that. The skate part of cheapskate refers to an old meaning of skate that is no longer in use. Skate used to mean an unkind, mean or contemptible person . It seems unclear why skate used to have this meaning, but the best guess is it seems that it may have been a variant of the Scottish word skite or skeet which did refer to a person that was considered to be contemptible or disliked. You know , just not a nice person or a mean person. So maybe it came from that. Okay, Anyway we just give two examples here. Example number one. Somebody might say my God ! He is such a cheapskate. The only reason he shaves the hair on his head is he doesn't want to pay for haircuts. You know something like that. That would be typical or number two here. We could say Bob is a real cheapskate. Anytime we buy rounds of beer, Bob always disappears when it is his turn.So he doesn't want to do what you know, you should do. Obviously, if everybody's buying a round, it's your turn, you should you should do it too. But you know, maybe he doesn't want to do it. So maybe he doesn't care what people think of him. He's a cheapskate. He doesn't want to spend that money. Okay. Anyway, I hope you got it. I hope it's clear. Thank you for your time. Bye-bye.
A2 US skate doesn origin tutor nick nice person English Tutor Nick P Word Origns (83) Cheapskate 11 0 anitawu12 posted on 2019/11/04 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary