flimsy
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈflɪmzi/
rhymes: -ɪmzi
Forms: form: flimsies
form: flimsying
form: flimsied
form: flimsied
Etymology: The origin of the adjective is uncertain; it is possibly from flim(-flam) (“(noun) false information presented as true, misinformation, nonsense; poor attempt at deception, confidence trick, pretence; (adjective) frivolous, nonsensical; deceptive; fictitious”) or a metathesis of film (“thin layer of a substance; slender thread”) + -sy (suffix forming adjectives and nouns).
The noun and verb are derived from the noun. Noun sense 4 (“metal container”) refers to the fact that the containers often split along their seams and leaked.
Senses: examples: text: Its method may be roughly said to be the invention, at all events for the main characters in their novels, of a psychology so tortuous and devious that its fantastic contours cannot be fitted into any single act or situation of or in life without an elaborate apparatus of dissertation. The artistic disadvantages of the method are many. One, and perhaps the chief, is a weakening—a "flimsying" of the structure because a proper proportion of the obvious, which is the thews and sinews of fiction, has, perforce, to be left out.
ref: 1926 February 21, “Feminist furor: Three Kingdoms. By Storm Jameson. 365 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. [book review]”, in The New York Times (Book review section), New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 8, column 5:
text: [W]hen he [A[rthur] Ernest Fitzgerald] tried to check reports that Lockheed was seriously "flimsying" the plane's construction, he received an angry call from Pentagon brass warning him, in effect, to keep out of engineering matters.
ref: 1981, James Nathan Miller, “Buying and Selling at the Pentagon”, in Marc Holzer, Ellen Doree Rosen, editors, Current Cases in Public Administration, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, →ISBN, section IV (Human Behavior), page 184:
text: Cry for the travesties of homes that now squat meagre on wide concrete bases, / flimsied in palm-leaf. They will not last, but they will have to do in the thin hungry scrabble to survive.
ref: 2003, “Facing the Challenges of Time and Place [5.57: On Coming Home from Kampuchea]”, in This We Can Say: Australian Quaker Life, Faith and Thought, Kenmore, Qld.: Faith and Practice Committee, Australia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), published 2004, →ISBN, page 280:
glosses: To make (something) likely to be easily damaged.
examples: text: An interview is not a speech. […] If a man wants to publish an allocution of this kind, he should write it out and give it to me, or anyone else—a newsagency for example—and it will be "flimsied" to most of our English daily papers, whose conductors would, of course, use their own discretion as to how much or how little of it they would use. But in no sense of the word could such a performance be properly classified under the heading of the interview.
ref: 1895 November, Frank Banfield, “Interviewing in Practice”, in The National Review, volume XXVI, number 153, London: Edward Arnold, […], →OCLC, page 368:
text: Did you, as a matter of fact, receive pages 55 and 56 at the same time?—I cannot say that I did. / But if you had received them?—I should have flimsied them with this. / As they are not flimsied, what do you say?—All I can presume is that they were not there. I should not have separated one paper from the other, and flimsied one and left the other.
ref: 1904 June 16, [Robert Wallace] Best, chairman and questioner; William Chessell, witness, “Select Committee. Privilege: Case of Senator Lt.-Col. [John Cash] Neild. Minutes of Evidence.”, in Journals of the Senate and Printed Papers having Special Reference to the Senate, volume I, [Canberra, A.C.T]: [F]or the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia by Rob[er]t S. Brain, Government Printer for the State of Victoria, published 1904, →OCLC, paragraphs 908–910, page 79:
text: […] Mr. Spencer Hughes, the Liberal, is accusing the Independent Labour men of being "blacklegs." Some of them, it seems, have been doing the work of two or three journalists in the House, flimsying and syndicating London Letters and Labour articles and notes in a number of newspapers. Cannot they be peacefully persuaded to attend to their own work, and leave journalism to journalists?
ref: 1907 June 22, “Notes of the week”, in The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, volume 103, number 2,695, London: […] Reginald Webster Page, […], →OCLC, page 765, column 2:
text: I [Phil May] lived down Brixton way and made a precarious living by flimsying news paragraphs and personally delivering copies at the newspaper offices. Sometimes they were used in full, occasionally they were ruthlessly cut down to a few lines; often they went direct to the waste-paper basket.
ref: 1923, Henry Lucy, chapter XIX, in The Diary of a Journalist: Fresh Extracts, volume III, London: John Murray, […], →OCLC, page 179:
glosses: To type or write (text) on a flimsy (“sheet of thin typing paper used together with carbon paper in a typewriter to make multiple copies of a document”) (noun sense 2).
examples: text: What she sacrificed in energy, emotion and integrity, diminished her rather than excelled. […] Teri suddenly saw herself flimsied by bargains she had negotiated too readily.
ref: 2008, Jill Stephenson, “Out of Order”, in One Life Passes for Another, [Bloomington, Ind.]: Xlibris, →ISBN, section 8, page 272:
glosses: To treat (someone or something) as paltry or unimportant; to demean, to underestimate.