Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Piker

Just recently, I was bemoaning what a piker I was, and then I paused. Did piker mean what I thought it meant?

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In a word, nope.

Merriam Webster has two definitions for this noun: 

1. One who gambles or speculates with small amounts of money
2. One who does things in a small way.

M-W lists first use (in the sense of the first definition) in 1859 and notes that the root word pike means to play cautiously and is of unknown origin.

Well, if you know anything about me and Slang-o-rama, you know that "unknown origin" words and phrases kick me into a research frenzy. So let's see what I can find...

World Wide Words is always a good place for etymological discussions, and in this case they have a nice post on piker, which I quote at length below, because it's so fascinating:

...If somebody piked himself in late medieval times he had furnished himself with a pilgrim’s staff — yet another sort of pike. Figuratively to pike oneself meant to travel on foot, go away or run away.

 It may be, though the evidence is sparse, that through the idea of running away the verb came to suggest withdrawing from a situation through excessive caution. In the US in the 1850s it began to be attached to small-time gambling and a piker was a man who made very small bets, often hedging them. This is the first example on record: "Piker is a man who plays very small amounts. Plays a quarter, wins, pockets the winnings, and keeps at quarters; and never, if he can help it, bets on his winnings. Vocabulum; or, The Rogue’s Lexicon, by George W Matsell, 1859."

Are those quarters on the table? (From the 1921 western, "The Beautiful Gambler")
By Universal Film Manufacturing Company - Exhibitors Herald (Jul. - Sep. 1921) on the Internet Archive, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60007022 

World Wide Words (WWW) continues, offering another possible origin story:

 Some reference books suggest a completely different source. A piker in the US was also a poor white migrant from the southern states. The first pikers were migrants to California, around the time of the 1849 Gold Rush, from Pike County, Missouri. (The county was named after Zebulon Pike, the soldier and explorer who also gave his name to Pikes Peak in Colorado.) This version of the term came to mean a worthless, lazy, good-for-nothing person.

 The subsequent history of piker in the US has interwoven these two strands so they are now hard to separate. Piker became a disparaging term with several senses, describing a person as a shirker, stingy, cowardly, a cheat or insignificant.... For the sake of completeness, perhaps I ought to mention that in Australia and New Zealand piker has yet another sense, of a person who agrees with enthusiasm to take part in some social event, but who later pulls out, often at the last minute and at some inconvenience to others. It is probable that it evolved independently from the old sense of a person who runs away.

Wow... California, Colorado, Missouri, Australia. This word has done a lot of traveling in its time!

Americanisms, Old and New, by John Stephen Farmer (1889) pretty much says the same thing as WWW, adding some moral outrage along the way. (Opinions and moral judgments abound in this 19th century dictionary, just as in the newspapers of the day.) The Online Etymological Dictionary agrees with the suggestion that U.S. usage arose from folks migrating West from Missouri (Pike County), but also adds piker might originally hail from the notion of a vagrant who wanders the pike or highway (i.e., turnpike) from 1838.  

Goodness, I've wandered far afield on this one, which seems appropriate, somehow. To bring it back around to the first definition, and as a reward for your patience in reading through my musings,  here's an iconic "gambling" song for your listening pleasure. 

Enjoy!