Akimbo

Part of speech: adverb

Pronunciation: /əˈkɪm.bəʊ/

Definitions

1. Positioned with limbs bent at the elbows and hands resting on the hips, conveying a sense of strength and assertiveness
2. Having the arms or legs bent and set away from the body in a way that forms angles away from a straight posture
3. With limbs arranged so that elbows or knees point outward, creating a distinctive angled stance

Etymology: When Erasmus wrote his handbook of manners for schoolboys in the 1530s, he paused over a pose every child knows: hand planted on the hip, elbow jutting out. He judged it suggestive, a little too swaggering to be quite proper for a well-bred boy. Nearly a century later the Italian Giovanni Bonifacio, cataloguing gestures in "L'arte de' cenni" (1616), read the same jutting elbow as a sign of strength, the stance of someone ready to push through a crowd. English already had a name for it, and the name is itself a drawing of a bent arm. It first turns up in late Middle English as a phrase: "in kenebowe" or "in kene bowe," meaning "in a keen bow," that is, in a sharp bend or angle. "Kene" is our "keen," a word that then meant brave as well as sharp, and "bowe" is the bow of the archer, the curve of anything bent. An arm held "in kenebowe" was bent to a point. That is the most likely reading, though not the only one. A long-standing rival traces the phrase to Old Norse "kengr," a bend or hook, and "bogi," a bow, and points to Icelandic "kengboginn," "bow-bent," as a cousin. Some dictionaries still lean toward the Norse. Either way, the bow is in it, and so it is twice over in the posture itself. The elbow is a bending word too: Old English "elnboga" was literally the bend of the forearm. To stand with arms akimbo is to make a sharp bow at the bow of the arm. Over the centuries the phrase was worn smooth. The little "in" shrank to "a-", the same way "on" collapsed into the front of "asleep" and "abed," and the spelling wandered through "akembo," "a kimbow" and plain "kimbo." Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa" (1748) still has "akembo." By the nineteenth century the modern form had settled: Anne Brontë and Charles Reade both set characters' arms akimbo, and in 1892 Arthur Conan Doyle gave the pose to a figure in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle." Later the word was extended beyond the arms. Writers now sprawl people across beds and lawns with their legs akimbo, bent and splayed every which way. That is a long way from Erasmus's schoolboy, but still a body caught in a keen bow.

Synonyms: bent, curved