shanker
Pluralshankers
- 1A golfer who shanks the ball, mishitting it badly.
After three balls in a row sailed into the trees, he admitted he had become a shanker.
The club's weekend shankers were banned from the practice tee nearest the parking lot.
Note
Shanking can seem catching, and the noun carries that sense of affliction: Harvey Penick, in And If You Play Golf, You're My Friend (1993), describes a club “infested with shankers, as if they all had a disease.” Players also use it of themselves, as when Blackie Sherrod counts himself among the “old hard-core shankers”.
- 2A shoe-factory worker who glues the shank into a shoe.
Each shanker on the line handled hundreds of shoe bottoms a shift, gluing a metal shank into every one.
When the plant automated its gluing, most of the shankers moved to other jobs on the floor.
Note
The job title has outlived the method. In 1913 a shanker tacked the shank in place and trimmed the leather gathered under the toe; in Deborah Boe's poem “Factory Work” (1986), the shankers glue the metal shanks in and fix them to the soles, fast enough to race each other. The verb travels with the noun: shankers shank.
- 3Obsolete form of chancre.
Note
This shanker is a different word that only shares the spelling: an obsolete way of writing chancre, the skin lesion sometimes associated with syphilis and other contagious diseases. It has nothing to do with the golfer or the shoe-factory worker; modern writing uses only chancre, so a shanker in an old medical text is the sore.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from shank + the suffix -er.