cheeky

Cheek was in Old English the word for the jawbone, but it extended in meaning to cover the flesh between the jawbone and the eye.  The leap to the meaning ‘effrontery’ is not quite clear but the earliest example from 1823 is ‘But the rogue had such an invincible cheek, and so smooth and oily a tongue’.  So I think it is that impudent gesture of raising your face to your opponent.  Actually face is used in the same way.  To have the face to do something.

So a person who was cheeky was insolent and presumptuous.  These days we tend to reserve its use for incidents of childish impudence.  If we use it to an adult it is usually in an amusing and light-hearted way.

But in its older, more serious sense it became a term of racial abuse in South Africa for a black person who behaved in a way that was above his station.  I’m pretty sure it was used in this way in South-East Asia as well and certainly in Australia.

In Aboriginal English it refers to an animal that is unpredictable and sometimes dangerous or a plant that is poisonous.  You can see the link between a cheeky Aboriginal who might turn violent and an animal that might misbehave or even attempt to kill you.  The children’s story about the cheeky camp dogs that cause trouble is at the milder end of the scale (authors Johanna Bell and Dion Beasley pictured above). A plant that is cheeky is not going to answer back but it might poison you.  The extension of cheeky to a plant follows from the use with animals, I guess, but J.M.Arthur in Aboriginal English comments that no one is quite convinced that this analysis is true.

So now we come back to the less serious use of cheeky to mean ‘impertinent’.  The transfer of this to some activity deemed mildly irresponsible or illicit (to quote the OED) seems to have happened in British English in the 1980s, but we use it too.  A cheeky beer, that is, a beer that you have at a time of day when you wouldn’t normally be drinking, is fine by us.  But a cheeky five-mile run, that is, a short run that you fit into a timetable that did not originally include a run is a slightly surprising extension of its use.  But there is no reason that we can’t apply cheeky to any little departure from rules and conventions.