NOT very long ago I was reminded of the saying as mean as Moke, which used to be common in the part of my family that comes from N.W. Derbyshire, but an explanation of who or what Moke might be did not readily occur to me. In some northern dialects moke is 'mist' or 'fog,' and in general dialect and in slang the word means 'donkey. The latter interpretation might be preferred by anyone familiar with the Cockney as mean as cat's,2 which also appears to refer to an animal, but the link is a very tenuous one, and both similes remain something of an enigma. Fortunately not all sayings about the parsimonious are as obscure. For instance, drastic though they are, two other Cockney expressions, E's so tight 'is arse squeaks, and E's so tight you couldn't get a tram ticket between the cheeks of 'is arse, are much less provocative from the linguistic point of view, since they clearly revolve around the double meaning of tight. Apart from examples of the sort I have just discussed, popular sayings about the miserly appear to fall into two main categories. Those in the first category are more or less realistic. They comment on the physical appearance, or, more commonly, on what may reasonably be assumed to be the actual habits of misers, whereas sayings of the second category are often in the form of a hyperbole, and give full rein to the imagination, claiming that in order to indulge his passion the skinflint would perform unlikely or impossible feats-that he would indeed skin a flint. Let us start with the more realistic type of description. In Westmoreland a person with a sharp, prominent nose was said to be snipe-nosed, and thought to be narrow and small-minded. In W. Yorkshire a sharp-nosed person, who was because of this feature assumed to be a miser and niggard, was known as a snipe-snout. Hence He's a snipesnout; he'll part wi' nowght. A miser will, not unnaturally, scrimp, or scrounge. The dialectal verb is substantivized to give scrouge, 'a stingy, niggardly person,' a word which Dickens may well have adapted in naming the miser of A Christmas Carol. Such a niggard will spend much of his time in scratching and scraping. He is thus known as a scart or scart-the-bowl, a scrat or scrat-penny. He is a scrape, scrapie or scrape-hard, a scrape-dish or scrape-daytions, a dashin being a tub used for kneading oatmeal dough. With his thumbnail he will presumably nip off or split the tiniest portion of food. Thus he is a split-curran, split-fig or split-raisin, a nip-cheese, nip-prune or nip-screed, while a baker who gives short weight in bread is called a nip-roll. A person like this is a nip-kite or nip-skin, one who would starve himself or others from covetousness.3 He is a rare good customer wheer they're givin' things away for nowt.4 Of such a nip-farthing one might say, 'Oh, he's such a scrimp-a regular gnarl-band, the implication being that he would gnaw string or twine rather than spend money on food. Such a one might be said not to part with the reek of his kale, 6 or, more pungently, not to be able to spare the reek off his own shit.7 Here we begin to enter the realm of the unlikely and bizarre, and I shall now turn to expressions that are inspired more by speculation than by observation.