Binky
Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2014 11:10 pm
• binky •
Pronunciation: bing-kee • Hear it!Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: 1. Security blanked or a favorite stuffed animal that soothes and offers comfort to a baby. Something babies must cling to in order to get to sleep. 2. A pacifier (US &: Canada), dummy (UK), soother (elsewhere). 3. A bunny pronk, a high hop of joy for a rabbit.
Notes: Today's Good Word may be two words: one referring to a pacifier, the other referring to a security toy or blanket. You'll have to read the Word History to find out why. Remember to change the Y to an I in the plural: binkies.
In Play: Because the word is used as a commercial name for a popular pacifier, many people know only this meaning: "What happened to the baby's binky? He didn't swallow it, did he?" We needn't stretch the sense of this word far to apply it more broadly: "Martin must have his coffee in his favorite cup, his 'binky'. I would be surprised if he didn't sleep with it."
Word History: Two sources have been proposed for Binky: (1) the commercial name for a pacifier manufactured by Playtex® and (2) a baby's pronunciation of blanket. According to Paul Ogden's research, binky first appeared in print in 1944 and Playtex came into existence only in 1947, so we can't give Playtex® the credit. We simply don't know how binky came to be associated with pacifiers. Blanket is from Old French blanchet "white flannel cloth", a diminutive of blanc "white". Old French apparently borrowed this word from a Germanic language. Proto-Germanic had a word blangkaz "shine, dazzle", which came to be German blank "shining, clean". This same word turned out in English as bleach, blanch and blank. (We now offer a blanket 'thank you' to Eric Berntson, who proposed today's Good Word in the Alpha Agora.)