cineast

Pronounced: SIH-nee-ast, noun

Notes: A word I should have have been able to figure out

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Yesterday’s word

The word pinchbeck, as an adjective, means “counterfeit; spurious”. As a noun, it is “an alloy of zinc and copper, used as imitation gold in jewelry”

First usage

Our word came into English in the mid-1700s

Background / Comments

I noted yesterday that our word reminded me of The Music Man film (1964). When Professor Harold Hill is stirring up the town, he gives a spiel called “Ya Got Trouble”. In it is the line …and the next thing ya know, your son is playin’ for money in a pinch-back suit. It turns out that “pinch-back” is really a distortion of our word (although it’s not clear to me how a suit can be ‘spurious’ or ‘counterfeit’). Our word comes from a real person: Christopher Pinchbeck, who invented the alloy that is the noun definition. He was, in his day, well-known, not merely for the alloy, but also for clocks and orreries (mechanical solar system models) which he made. He kept the means to create the alloy a closely-guarded secret. That didn’t stop crooked men from creating articles that claimed to be made from Pinchbeck’s alloy; in fact, an unusual case of people faking fake gold. I presume that the adjective definition came about because Mr Pinchbeck’s alloy was used for imitation gold.