World Wide Words

From the Weird Words section

Snickersnee

If we ever come across this word now, it’s most probably in the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado: “As he squirmed and struggled, / And gurgled and guggled, / I drew my snickersnee!” A snickersnee was a large knife.

A couple of centuries earlier it was not a single word but a phrase, steake or snye, which was also written as stick or snee, snick or snee, snick-a-snee, or in other ways. All these versions go back to a couple of Dutch words, steken, to thrust or stick, and snijden, to cut. We have exactly the same phrase, though inverted, made from native English words: cut and thrust.

Snickeersnee and its variations referred to a type of hand-to-hand fighting with pointed knives, or — by the end of the eighteenth century — to the knife one did it with.

It was fairly common in Victorian Britain, and appeared several times in works by William Makepeace Thackeray, for example in his Burlesques: “Otto, indeed, had convulsively grasped his snickersnee, with intent to plunge it into the heart of Rowski; but his politer feelings overcame him. ‘The count need not fear, my lord,’ said he: ‘a lady is present.’”

It seems certain that Lewis Carroll had it in mind when he wrote Jabberwocky: “One, two! One, two! And through and through / The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!”