shinny

present singular third person shinnies · participle present shinnying · participle past shinnied · past shinnied

1. intransitiveTo climb in an awkward manner.

   Synonyms: shimmy, shin

1. CanadauncountableAn informal game of pickup hockey played with minimal equipment: skates, sticks and a puck or ball.

   In shinny, everyone wins. Though rules are scaled back, the game is not loosened beyond all form, and the driving competitive element remains.

   2010, Jason Blake, Canadian Hockey Literature: A Thematic Study, University of Toronto Press (cloth-bound) (paperback), chapter two: “The Hockey Dream: Hockey as Escape, Freedom, Utopia”, page 63

   1 more example

   Hockey fiction shows that the focus on ludus in organized hockey threatens to strangle the primal play spirit, which is why shinny is more easily romanticized than versions of the game that seem to require fighting, that motivate parents to violence, and, at the highest level, give rise to lockouts and strikes. In shinny the playful core of hockey is retained, while the overly confining rules and restrictions are discarded.

   2010, ibidem, page 70

2. CanadauncountableStreet hockey.
3. CanadainformaluncountableHockey.
4. USuncountableanthropologyA hockey-like game played by American Indians.

1. uncountableMoonshine. (illegal alcohol)

   Miss Maudie Atkinson baked a Lane cake so loaded with shinny it made me tight;....

   1960 July 11, Harper Lee, chapter 13, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC

   1 more example

   He sent them packing next day armed with their charts and five quarts of shinny in their saddlebags—two apiece and one for the Governor.

   1960 July 11, Harper Lee, chapter 13, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC