sharpie

Brand name and common noun at once. Capitalized, Sharpie refers to the trademarked marker itself. Lowercase, a sharpie can be any felt-tipped marker of that kind, whoever made it. In careful or commercial writing, keep the capital for the brand, and say marker or felt-tip pen when the maker matters.

American and a shade disreputable, as in Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye (1953), where a couple of sharpies trade pieces of Twentieth Century Fox with double arm gestures instead of money. The word puts the cheat's cleverness first. It shares its quickness with the alert person, and context decides whether that sharpness is admired or distrusted.

The diminutive -ie turns sharp into a person, and every sense of the word shares that build. Here it is praise, sometimes grudging, for someone who sees through things quickly: the magazine seller sized up at a glance, or the seasoned opponents in Richard W. Munchkin's Gambling Wizards (2012). The tone is admiring; the swindler is the same word turned sour.

A working hull type, flat-bottomed and shallow-drafted. Greg Rössel's The Boatbuilder's Apprentice (2006) dates the earliest to the mid-nineteenth century and says they were built for the oyster fishery of the Connecticut shore. On the Outer Banks, a pair brought to Beaufort by schooner was used for fishing, oyster dredging and even ferrying passengers. In boatbuilding talk, flat-bottomed sharpies is the natural pairing.

The word belongs to Australia and to a particular era of its street life. It is sharp plus the diminutive -ie, and members could also be called simply sharps. Close-cropped hair and tailored clothes marked them out. The noun also works as a modifier: Iain McIntyre's Tomorrow Is Today (2006) calls a Preston ballroom "another popular sharpie hang-out." Keep it apart from the swindler.

A coastal angler's word, regional rather than general. Ken Schultz, writing in Field & Stream in 1976, places it in New York and New Jersey fishing parlance. The title is earned, not claimed: a person eventually becomes a sharpie after long experience. Outside that circle, listeners are more likely to hear the general 'alert person', so writing for a wider audience calls for a word of explanation.

Hawk-watchers' shorthand for Accipiter striatus, the smallest hawk resident in the USA and Canada, a hunter of songbirds and, on occasion, of spring chicks. The clipped name sits comfortably beside technical detail: Bill Thompson, Eirik A. T. Blom and Jeffrey A. Gordon's Identify Yourself (2005) notes that sitting sharpies almost always show a notched tail. The plural is regular.

Across the Pacific the same clipping names a different bird. In Australian and New Zealand birding it is Calidris acuminata, the sharp-tailed sandpiper, not the American hawk. It keeps company with other clipped wader names, so birders compare a sharpie with a pec or a knot, and they often capitalize it as a species name. When readers may come from either side of the Pacific, the full name is safer.