slim

The most common use of slim is as an adjective meaning slender or thin, but that is not the only use of the word, and its earliest known appearance in English is as a noun meaning a tall person. It’s a sixteenth-century borrowing from Dutch. In English, slim, meaning slender, almost always has a positive connotation, although in Dutch it can be negative as well.

There is also a slang sense of slim meaning sly or clever, with a connotation of untrustworthiness. One famous use of the slang term is in the 1962 David Lean film Lawrence of Arabia in which American journalist Jackson Bentley (played by Arthur Kennedy) has this exchange with Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness). The conversation is supposed to represent speech from c. 1916:

Faisal: Do you know General Allenby?

Bentley: Watch out for Allenby. He's a slim customer.

Faisal: Excuse me?

Bentley: A clever man.

Faisal: Slim customer. It's very good . . . I'll certainly watch out for him.

But this and the other senses of slim are much older than this movie or the era it is set in.

The earliest use of slim in English, in the sense of a tall person, that I’m aware of is in a definition of the Latin longurio in Thomas Cooper’s 1548 Latin–English dictionary:

Longurio, longurionis, masc. gen. Homo prælongus. A long slimme. Varro apud Nonium.

The adjectival use of the word appears in the mid seventeenth century. In his 1630 poem An Epitome of the Worlds Woe, George Duchante uses slim to mean small, slight, or thin, but in reference fortune or luck, not to a person:

Vnto his mother Altine wrote a letter,
That she might beare his banishment the better.
(Mother said he) I n’ere gaue credit to,
Or trusted Fortunes slimme and subtle show
Although ’twixt me and her did often grow,
Great friendlinesse ’'twas fild with fraud I know.

Three years later, William Harvey’s medical text Anatomical Exercitations uses the adjective in reference to people:

And therefore amongst grown persons, the long slimme Fellows, (whose Thighs, but especially their Shanks, are longer then [sic] ordinary) can stand, walk, run, or vault longer, and at more ease, then square, and well trussed men.

But this sense was by no means confined to medical contexts. George Thornley’s 1657 translation of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe uses the adjective:

How is it possible for one to catch him? he's small and slim, and so will slip and steal away. And how should one escape, and get away from by flight?

And the slang untrustworthy sense also appears in the mid seventeenth century. Here is an example from Elizabeth Fools Warning, a 1659 poem advising women to not marry older men:

His promises then did please me well,
I loved to go fine I must you tell,
Oh! I was fowly cheated by this old slim,
And on a Palmsunday was married to him
Unknown unto my kindred all
On slippery yce I then did fall.

Again, the noun precedes the adjective in the record, although not by much. We see slim used to mean sly and untrustworthy in a 1664 anti-Catholic polemic by Henry More:

Onely I cannot let go this seasonable opportunity of triumphing in her behalf, in that she is so throughly [sic] reformed from that notorious, though subtle and slim, piece of Antichristianism, I mean that Self-ended Policy in those Doctrines and Practices which are so many in the Church of Rome and so profitable, and yet Our Heaven-directed Reformation has perfectly refined us and cleansed us from them all.

All these senses seem to be in continuous use through to the present. But in the 1980s a grimmer sense of slim made its appearance, that is in slim disease, an African-English coinage for what would become known as AIDS. The term makes its published appearance in the medical journal The Lancet from 19 October 1985:

Most patients present with fever, an itchy maculopapular rash, general malaise, prolonged diarrhoea, occasional respiratory symptoms, and oral candidiasis, but the most dominant feature is extreme wasting and weight loss. Hence the syndrome is known locally as slim disease.

Sources:

Cooper, Thomas. Thesaurus linguæ Romanæ and Britannicæ. London: Thomas Berthelet for Henry Wykes, 1565, s.v. longurio, sig. BBbb 6v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO). [The OED cites a 1548 edition.]

Duchante, George. An Epitome of the Worlds Woe. London: Thomas Cotes and Richard Cotes, 1630, n.p. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. slim, adj.

Harvey, William. Anatomical Exercitations. London: James Young for Octavian Pulleyn, 1653, 330. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Liberman, Anatoly. Word Origins . . . and How We Know Them. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005, 199–200.

Longus. Daphnis and Chloe. George Thornley, trans. London: John Garfield, 1657, 61–62. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

More, Henry. A Modest Enquiry into the Mystery of Iniquity. London: J. Flesher for W. Morden, 1664, 475. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. slim, adj.; Additions Series, 1993, s.v. slim, n.

Serwadda, D., et al. “Slim Disease: A New Disease in Uganda and Its Association with HTLV-III Infection.” Lancet, 19 October 1985, 849–52 at 849. Elsevier: Science Direct.

With, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Fools Warning. London: Francis Coles, 1659, 4. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Unknown artist, c. 1917. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.