Skid means 'Street Kid' from Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day at www.billcasselman.com

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Skid is a very old word in English with a relatively new slang meaning. Skid now means a young hood, a street thug, a youth who is “no good.” Frequent usage citations confirm that skid is a term used more in Alberta than in any other Canadian province. Even Alberta social workers employ the term, no doubt with compassion.

Here’s a locus classicus of this new use of skid, a juicy entry from an online journal by an Edmonton high-school boy in 2003:

“So here I am with my buddy . . .who is Métis and we were going around in the pit having a good time, when a skin took down a street-kid whose name I cannot remember. He hit him and called him a skid, who does nothing but loot in the garbage. That pissed me off because this is a place for fun, and it was an all-ages show so all these teensters were getting exposed to this shit that did not need to be there. I got into it and we pushed each other away, but the skin kicked me and I flipped. I mean, you did not want to be in my pathway. I don’t care if you knew karate or any of that ninja, romper-stomper shit.”

A punkish band named Sum 41 put out a 2001 CD with a title song “Fat Lip” which contains these lyrics : “As a kid, I was a skid and no one knew me by name./I trashed my own house party ‘cause nobody came.”

Published this autumn (2006) by Arsenal Press is a new collection of short stories by Cathleen With entitled Skids. One of the street kids or skids is a sixteen-year-old suicidal prostitute and drug addict named Jesse.

Etymology of Skid = Bad Kid

One suggestion is that this modern skid is a contraction of street kid? Unlikely.

Extremely likely: these disreputable kids cause shit for everybody. They are like skids, skid marks, fecal streaks on the inside of underwear. That’s the origin, the word’s popularity and persistence aided by having ‘kids’ make up the chief part of the word.

Skid & Ski Have Similar Origin

Skid is one of the words borrowed into Old English during the Viking raids and settlements toward the end of the first millennium. Old Norse, now also called Old Scandinavian, had skith ‘stick of wood.’ The same root gave us ‘ski,’ a specialized stick of wood.

Skid Row and Skid Road

Skidroad and its later variant skid row come from west coast lumbering slang. The first Skid Road in Canada was in Vancouver in an area presently bounded by Carrall and Cordova Streets. From there the term spread across Canada as the designation of any slummy part of a city or town populated by rubbies and winos. In Vancouver ’s early days, the area was the terminus of an actual skidroad, a slideway used to drag logs to water or to railway track for transport to a lumber mill.

A skidroad was a specialized kind of corduroy road. Skids were peeled and greased logs, laid transversely across a cleared pathway, so that teams of oxen, horses, or mules could haul rough timber down them. In the first B.C. lumber camps the grease used was frequently dogfish oil. The men who built such logging trails were called skidders and so were the teamsters who drove the horses. Later on, when motorized vehicles replaced horses and mules, the phrase “skidder tractor” appeared.

How was skidroad altered to Skid Row? Unemployed loggers often gathered at the end of these trails to ask a boss for work. When no jobs were available, it was time for a little logging R & R. In Vancouver and in Seattle , this involved booze, broads, and brothels to which gambling was soon added. Then came cheap lodging houses for the out-of-work loggers, rough hiring halls, beer parlours, mission soup kitchens, and an influx of transients, derelicts, and petty criminals. The apex for a time in Vancouver was Water Street with its rows of saloons and flophouses.

Canada can stake a claim to this second Skid Road, but not the first one. That was a street called Yesler’s Way in Seattle, Washington, constructed in 1852. When coastal stands of lumber were depleted and logging operations moved inland, the name Skid Road stuck, and was soon altered by folk etymology to Skid Row. “On skid row” became synonymous with down- and-out.

From Canadian and American lumbering slang sprang several verb phrases:

• to hit the skids ‘to be broke or unemployed, to fail utterly’

• to grease the skids ‘to make things easier’

• to pull the skids out from under ‘to cause to decline, to abandon support for’

• to put the skids under ‘to topple, to cause to fail’

More Usage Citations

Here’s an expanded definition on a 2003 blog from Coquitlam, British Columbia: “Skid is SUPPOSED to be a short way of saying “street kid” but society has warped it into meaning anyone that dresses “alternatively” meaning goth, punk, etc. Basically just the people that don’t fit into the category of poplular, geek or normal.”

Ontario Phrase: Skid Pit

In November of 2006, a poster from Orangeville, Ontario on The Hempfiles Forum wrote this: “There were no real cliques in my school, but for one exception, the skids. They hung out in the “skid pit;” some were goth, some were punk, some were whiggers, some were just those kids who don’t stand out, all of them were dirty dirty kids. In fact that’s what really united the skid pit, they were all dirty dirty kids. So in my school, it wasn’t like oh you’re emo, oh you’re a jock or oh you’re a stoner. You were either a skid or you weren’t, and being a skid was a bad thing.”

A skid pit is a nook in a school hallway, perhaps an area under a suspended stairway or, in fair weather, an exterior area hidden from school monitors by trees and shrubs, where a clique convenes. Skid pit also refers to a section of a dance hall or night club frequented by "skids."

Below is a passage from a feature in the LA Weekly, March 8, 2006 , entitled “Coming of Age in the Mouth of Madness” by Sam Slovick.

“Adam and Joel are Skids, kids who came of age on Skid Row… A brand new Skids inductee, Joey looks like hell.”

A blogger’s response to the above article proves the word has not spread into general use in the United States:

“Another example of that is when he tags the kids of Skid Row as - ‘ Skids’ - a term I have never heard before and a term none of the people I talked to today who work with these kids has ever heard before. However, one woman who does work with these kids on a daily basis, said it was shameful that the writer would tarnish these kids with a slur like that.”

Here are three more industrial uses of the term skid, illustrated by photograph.