At last you declare, “Must you be so fricking finicky!” One can picture going picnicking with a kid named Finnegan (or maybe Nicky) who picks at food and calls it icky and insists he will be sick unless he has a flawless pickle sandwich. Also, somewhere back in the mind, fidgety. Overtones: It’s hard not to suspect the sense and usage of the word are influenced by its echoes of panicky and picky and fickle and, of course, icky, and maybe even fink. Some people and things are notoriously finicky. Apparently fish are also seen as finicky. About what? Food, weather, being touched, what have you.
Finicky pronunciation plus#
Where did all this come from? A common but uncertain supposition is that it’s from fine plus ical as in cynical and ironical.Ĭollocations: I think first of ads about cats being finicky eaters, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English puts finicky eater(s) high on the list, just below finicky about. The apparent oldest of the set is finical, dating from the late 1500s finicky doesn’t hit the scene until the early 1800s. In short, the word draws back and tightens and hardens, like a person who has just touched something icky.Įtymology: Finicky is related to the verb finick and the noun and adjective finicking and the adjective finical. Each consonant is followed by a high front vowel, with the last one the highest and tightest. In the mouth: There is a procession backwards in the mouth, from lips via tongue tip to velum, and from softer to harder, starting with that softest fricative, moving through a nice nasal, and hitting a crisp voiceless at last. There follows a more ordinary assortment of vertical strokes and curves, but with a sudden departure to diagonals in the ky at the end, as though the person has gone completely snaky – no, that’s too sinuous perhaps freaky.
In order to keep the top of the f and the dot on the i from conflicting, many type faces will have a separate fi character, which has either a reduced f or an f that dots the i with its forelock. Visual: This word starts off with a pair of letters that some typographers are quite finicky about, fi.
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