Piker
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Piker pik·er n. Slang
A cautious gambler.
A person regarded as petty or stingy.
See also Pikey. ==Wikipedia==
Origin: 1858
Pike County, Missouri, is located on the Mississippi River north of St. Louis and just south of Mark Twain's Hannibal. It is still a quiet rural county, noted for the Stark Brothers Nursery and not much else. But its name is known nationwide, thanks to Pikers, who followed the gold rushes to California and Colorado in the mid-nineteenth century. By the late 1850s they were so prominent in these adventures that Piker became the nickname for anyone from Missouri, not just from Pike County. We find them in a Marysville, California, newspaper of 1860: "Pillbox said they were there for the benefit of the 'Pikers,' that they might learn to read."
The Pikers were not noted for quickness of wit or spectacular success at finding gold, but they did gain a reputation for frugality. A Piker would not gamble, drink, or spend his money to excess. Thus he was viewed by the free-spending majority as a timid cheapskate. And so piker, having lost its association with a particular place and thereby its capital letter, came to mean someone of no boldness or ambition, someone who ventures little and always plays it safe. The term applied first to small-stakes gamblers, then to small-stakes investors in the stock market, then to slackers in any enterprise. Missouri nowadays has no more pikers than anyplace else.
Piker also used as a derogatory definition for "john bircher cracker types" who are too cheap to go out for dinner, but sly enough to freeload while packing an agenda of cheapness, bigotry and libertarian vulgarity.
"Call me a piker for picking your brain but "possibly" is what interests me." As I mentioned many states have Pike Counties (separately interesting)and Australia has none. I'm curious how a slang word (with similar meanings) could appear in two very different places. Suggests that your reference (obsolete, thief) may be the common source, not former residence.
"Pike" has so many meanings that it's easy to imagine several origins for "piker." There is no special knowledge that would promote one origin over another. Webster's, 1934, has another definition for "piker": a tramp or vagrant (slang), probably, it says, from "pike" = turnpike = road or highway. The Pike County in Missouri is the only one mentioned for "pike" defined as "on the Pacific coast, one of a class of shiftless vagrant poor farmers."
Maybe one of these slang senses was exported to Australia from the U.S.? The Dictionary of American Slang says "piker" has meant a miser or small-minded person since c. 1900 and a coward since c. 1915.
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