29 November 2023
A cinch is an Americanism meaning an easy task or, in the context of gambling, a sure thing. The formal etymology is quite straightforward, if not immediately obvious; the word is a borrowing from the Mexican Spanish cincha (strap, band). There is also the phrase lead-pipe cinch, which is an intensified version of the base word, but what lead pipes have to do with easy tasks or sure things is a mystery.
Cinch first appears in the 1860s as a very literal borrowing from the Spanish. The original English sense, one that is still current today, is the belt that runs underneath a horse’s belly and holds the saddle in place. The first use that I’m aware of is in the journal of naturalist John Keast Lord, who on 27 April 1860 had this to say about horsemanship in California:
The breaking-in is a very simple affair: while the animal is down the eyes are bandaged, and a powerful Spanish bit placed in the mouth. This accomplished, he is allowed to get up, and the saddle is firmly “synched.” The saddles commonly used in California differs [sic] very little from those used in Mexico.
Mark Twain, writing home to his mother from the island of Maui on 4 May 1866, used the present-day spelling:
I got the same leg hurt last week; I said I hadn’t got hold of spirited horse since I had been on the island, and one of the proprietors loaned me a big vicious colt; he was altogether too spirited; I went to tighten the cinch before mounting him, when he let out with his left leg (?) and kicked me across a ten-acre lot.
And in a speech given in San Francisco on 2 October 1866 about his stay in the Hawaiian Islands, Twain used cinch as verb meaning to tighten:
They are wild, free riders, and perfectly at home in the saddle—they call it a saddle, a little vile English spoon of thing with a girth that never is tight enough to touch the horse and sometimes without any girth at all. With their loose ideas, they never cinch a Californian’s horse tight enough to suit him.
But very quickly, cinch developed a slang sense meaning to cheat, to tightly control the outcome of some transaction. To be cinched was to be the victim of such a scam, to be squeezed like a horse’s belly by a cinch. From a description of San Francisco slang by Samuel Williams that appeared in Scribner’s Monthly in July 1875:
When stocks are active they are said to be “booming;” a panic in the market is expressed by the term “more mud;” a man who is hurt in a mining transaction is “cinched;” a weak man is said to have “no sand in him;” a lying excuse is denounced as “too thin.”
And such scams were called cinch games. From Carson City, Nevada’s Morning Appeal of 24 June 1877:
Of a wretched, mean trick-game nventedi [sic] for the purpose of the deliberate robbery of the unwary and gullable [sic], the Reno Journal of June 22 says:
Yesterday morning at 7 A.M., one-armed Saulsbury and Jim Walker enticed John Broullette, a French boy who had money, over to the V. & T. bridge, and by certain blandishments got him to bet $35 on a knife trick. They said he lost the bet and then pocketed the money, and walked to Huffaker’s—the boy following them, asking for his money every few steps. They got on the freight train and came back to Reno. The boy stepped into a buggy and got here about as soon as they did, and swore out a warrant and the officers arrested them, but the knife could not be found, they having made away with it. The trick is to bet that the greeny cannot open the blade before fifty is counted. A catch is slipped over the spring which makes opening an impossibility. The case will probably come up to-day, when the prisoners will have an opportunity to explain it. These “cinch” games are getting entirely too frequent, and all law-abiding citizens demand that the sharpers be severely punished.
Complicating the search for nineteenth-century uses of cinch is a very different use. Cinch was also the name of a trick-taking card game developed in the 1880s. The name of the game, which was invented in Colorado, is probably taken from the slang sense meaning to tightly secure the tricks. We see the card game named in the April 1886 issue of Overland Monthly:
The town on a Sunday evening presents a marked contrast—saloons crowded; music, dancing and gambling; faro, licensed by the territory of Arizona, in full blast; Mexican games with Mexican cards; and the all-absorbing poker—poker in all its various forms and attractions, from the small calibre of a freezeout game to that in which each chip stands for a gold piece, and rises with a geometrical ratio after the ante; reckless playing, and drunken playing, with an occasional cinch game; miners, professionals, laborers, business men, all in the throng, and representatives of each in the play.
We can see that the slang sense of cinch developed along a logical, if not immediately obvious path from the literal use to mean a belt and then to tighten or secure and on to mean a sure or easily accomplished thing.
But where does lead-pipe cinch come from? That one is anybody’s guess, and the written record, as we currently know it, offers few clues.
The earliest use of lead-pipe cinch that I’m aware of is from Camden, New Jersey’s Evening Telegram of 5 November 1887. It, like most of the earliest uses of the phrase, is in the context of horseracing:
Jimmy McLaughlin has a sure thing, and “air tight” and a “lead pipe” cinch on the premier jockeyship now. It was the hardest fight he ever had, and was literally a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.
Another early use is an article in the Boston Globe with the dateline 28 July 1888:
Jockey Freeman came in for a great ovation every time he returned to the stand after a race. He won two races and finished second in another. The hardest hit the talent received was over the Alabama stakes. They considered Lucky Baldwin’s great filly Los Angeles a “lead pipe cinch,” and put their money on at any odds. Thanks to Jimmy McLaughlin’s riding the stakes went to the Dwyer brothers’ treasury by Bella B.’s victory.
And by the end of that decade, lead-pipe cinch was being used outside the context of horseracing. From an advertisement for a comedy show that appeared in Chicago’s Daily Inter Ocean of 11 November 1889:
CHICAGO OPERA HOUSE—Fireproof.
David Henderson……………….manager
CHICAGO ALSO SAYS “IT IS A LEAD PIPE CINCH.”
RUSSELL’S COMEDIANS
in the
CITY DIRECTORY
A Veritable Surprise in Farce Comedy.
3 Hours of the Most Hilarious Fun with the Greatest Company of Farce Comedians Ever Organized.
Every Evening, Wednesday and Saturday Matinees.
COME * EARLY * AND * GET * SEATS.
And the New-York Tribune of 16 December 1889 uses the phrase in the context of political corruption:
Statements are made showing that Senators were bought for $1,000 each and the Representatives averaged about $500. The money was transferred in a unique manner. The briber and the bribed would sit down to a game of poker. A “lead pipe cinch” was nothing compared to the sure thing that the legislator had in the game.
On their face, these early uses offer little in the way of evidence for how lead pipes became associated with cinches. But that very first citation offers a clue to one possible explanation in its use of air tight. An air-tight cinch makes sense, particular in the context of a horse’s tack. One not only wants the belt to be tight, so there is no air gap between it and the horse, but one also wants to tighten the cinch immediately after the horse has exhaled. Otherwise, the cinch will become loose as the horse breathes. The phrase air-tight cinch, both literal and metaphorical, is common in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Lead-pipe cinch may have developed as a mishearing, either accidental or intentional and jocular, of air-tight cinch.
For instance, we see this piece written by Lewis Anderson in 1891 for the New York Advertiser and reprinted in newspapers across the country that makes use of a number of such non-sensical types of cinches:
The tout regained consciousness and muttered: “The track will be heavy to-morrow, and I’ve got a copper-riveted, lead-pipe, copyrighted, air-tight cinch. Firenzi in the mud—she swims in it—she can make the pace so hot that the track will be dry before she does the first quarter.
This explanation is far from a certainty. It is speculation with only the faintest bit of evidence behind it. But it is better than other explanations that have been proffered over the years. These include using a lead pipe to twist and tighten the cinch around a horse, or even to knock the wind out of the horse before tightening the cinch (one might want to force the horse to exhale before cinching the saddle, but one would not use a lead pipe, an object unlikely to be found in a stable, to do it, not one wants the horse in good riding condition). Another has to do with plumbers tightening pipes. All the other explanations I have heard lack evidence or are absurd on their face.
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