miserliness

cheeseparing Penny-pinching, stinginess; excessive economy or frugality. This British expression, which dates from the mid-1800s, is a reference to the practice of taking excessive care when paring the rind from cheese so as to waste as little as possible.

close as a clam Close-fisted; parsimonious; stingy. This phrase alludes to the difficulty involved in opening a clam. One who is “close as a clam” hoards his possessions, making them inaccessible to others.

clutch-fist A miser; a close-fisted person; a stingy, ungenerous character. This obsolete phrase, as well as the truncated clutch, appeared in print as early as 1630. The image is of a hand selfishly grasping or clutching.

nickel nurser A miser, tightwad, or penny pincher. This expression, clearly alluding to the disproportionate amount of affectionate attention that a churl gives to his money, is infrequently used today.

penny pincher A miser, skinflint, or tightwad; a stingy or niggardly person; an overly thrifty or frugal person. In this expression, penny ‘one cent’ emphasizes the pettiness of pincher One who saves in a miserly manner.’ A variation is pinchpenny. Similarly, to pinch pennies is to stint on expenditures, to economize.

piker A tightwad, a cheapskate. This Americanism appears to have originated during the Gold Rush, when the Forty-Niners applied this epithet to those among them who had come from Pike County, Missouri. By 1880, when piker denoted a two-bit gambler, its connotations were clearly derogatory, and the term was well on its way to its more general current application.

skinflint A miser, penny pincher, tightwad; a mean, avaricious, niggardly person. This term is derived from the earlier to skin a flint which was based on the idea that only an excessively rapacious person would even attempt to remove and save the nonexistent skin of a rock such as flint. One source recounts the tale of an Eastern caliph who was so penurious that he issued his soldiers shavings that he had “skinned” from a flint to save the cost of their using complete flints in their rifles.

tight as the bark on a tree Extremely stingy or close-fisted. This American colloquialism conveys the idea of tightness, or miserliness, by using an image with the flavor of frontier life familiar to the early settlers.

tightwad A miser, a cheapskate, a scrooge, a tight-fisted, stingy person.

The allusion is to the way a miser, not wanting to part with his money, tightly clutches his wad or folded roll of bills. Use of this popular Americanism dates from about the turn of this century.

Vermont charity A now little used hobo term for sympathy—the implication being that Yankee frugality and independence would refuse handouts to those seeking them, offering instead only the inedible solace of sympathy.