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We’ll lighten up today with something I’ve wanted to do for a long time – i.e., help propel a great new word into common English usage. The word is “sneak” — as in “he’s a sneak guy (or gal)” — but it doesn’t mean what you’re thinking. For far from describing someone of low character, a “sneak guy” is someone who is supremely accomplished but who would never boast about it. Typically, one would find out about the person’s amazing background in an off-handed way — perhaps from a relative or third party, but never from the person himself.
As far as I can recall, the word was coined in the 1960s by a ZBT fraternity brother of mine, Dave “the Ripper” Shaw. I have never heard the word used by anyone but a Zeeb who attended University of Virginia during the late 1960s. Dave was a year ahead of me, and there were some unusual success stories in his Class of ‘70. “Scheins” went on to become a movie producer of, among other films, For a Few Good Men, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally. And another Zeeb, “Bob K,” managed Bjorn Borg’s tennis career before
going on to even bigger things as CEO of the top sports-talent agency in the world. Both were sneak guys, but not because of their spectacular careers. Bob was sneak because he had been a yo-yo champion as a child. He and his brother used to travel to tournaments on one bicycle, so certain were they that one of them would win a second bike for the trip home. And Scheins, a skinny little runt-of-a-guy, was a supremely gifted tennis player, baseball shortstop and touch-football quarterback.
Strong as an Ape
As for Shaw, he was an athlete, built like a lowland gorilla, with a jawline to match. One cool spring night, he was sitting on some steps with a friend, waiting for a ride back to UVa after a date at a college down the road. Wearing a t-shirt and no jacket, he was hunched up on the steps to keep warm when some townies looking for a fight evidently took him and a friend, Danny, for wimps. Four of them emerged from a car, but before they could even approach, Danny set upon one of them with a flurry of punches so violent that he broke his own nose trying to demolish the would-be thug. When the other three men approached Shaw, he stood up, unfurled his massive upper body, and uttered the legendary line, “Why don’t you guys take a few on my stomach while my friend finishes up.” What made Shaw very sneak, however, was not his toughness or ape-man strength, but the fact that he was ranked as the top student in an honors program offered by UVa’s government department. He currently practices law.
Below are a few more examples of sneak people I’ve known. After you’ve pondered the descriptions, please try to think of people you know who are sneak, or perhaps even very sneak. Then, by all means, use the word whenever you please. Like some great Yiddish words, such as mensch, schmuck and goniff, you’ll discover that “sneak” is uniquely suited to describing a certain type of person who is more than merely amazing. Some examples:
- Martin A: My college roommate for two years, he got us and three others evicted from a farmhouse we’d rented when he came home very drunk one Saturday night, as always, and crashed a tractor into a tree after attempting to jump-start it. (He’d already poured kerosene in the gas tank, thinking it was gasoline.) He was such a party animal that even the Animal Party frats — Sigma Nu, Phi Gam and SAE, among others — decided it was too risky to pledge him and took a pass. Martin, who had an identical twin named Stedman, graduated near the top of our class and retired in his mid-thirties after making a killing in real estate. He’d always said that all it takes to get rich is one good trade. He also figured prominently in John Krakauer’s best seller Into Thin Air, having survived the disastrous Mt. Everest expedition that was the subject of the book. Pilot-trained, Martin recognized an ominous cloud formation as he approached the summit and, as he later told me, “got the hell out of Dodge.”
- Rae Lynn J: movie-star beautiful, she starred in a low-budget production called I’m Hot. She has skied the steeps in Crested Butte, where she once owned a health food store, and also water-skied at speeds above 100 mph. A self-taught architect, she designed and built her home – bricks, pipes, wiring and all — with her husband, a plumber and avid cross-country skier. Her paintings could hang in a museum — really — but she gave it up to pursue other interests.
- Gerry C: For years, I and many others knew Gerry as a nice, if unusually soft-spoken, guy. He worked as a mailman, but after a Thanksgiving dinner one year, when the discussion turned to Vietnam, we discovered that he had been a war hero, much decorated for deeds of astounding courage.
- Richard K: The ‘significant other’of a cousin of mine, Dick is a mathematician and also a walking encyclopedia of baseball trivia. When I stayed with them for the first time, I put my keys and spare change in a silver bowl in the guest room, not realizing that it was the A.M. Turing Award. Dick, too modest to mention it himself, turns out to have solved the Traveling Salesman Problem, among others. At 78, he heads up a research project that aced out Harvard, Stanford and MIT for a huge federal grant. Someone else would have to tell you these things, though, since Dick would much rather talk about the Red Sox.
- Milton Ackerman: I was about eight when I learned that my father had graduated first in his medical school class and been editor of the yearbook. It was while flipping through the book that I discovered these facts, along with another told in news clips stashed between the pages. Fresh out of medical school, it turns out, he had used his forensic skills as a pathologist to solve a notorious murder case in Pennsylvania that had been made to look like a suicide. We all have egos that need to be stroked in some way, but if my father, a truly humble man, had one, neither I nor anyone else I know ever felt it.
And now, dear readers, I would be sincerely grateful if you would take the word “sneak” as your own and spread it far and wide.
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