tinker

A lengendary baseball double-play. The phrase is used as the refrain in the poem "Baseball's Sad Lexicon" by Franklin Piece Adams. It refers to three Chicago Cubs players from the early 20th century: Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance. I wish I had been born in an earlier era, so that I could have seen Tinker to Evers to Chance—not to mention Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and all the famous players of yore.

Fig. not to care at all. (A tinker's damn or dam may be a worthless curse from a tinker or a small dam or barrier used to contain molten metal.) I don't give a tinker's damn whether you go or not!

Inf. worthless. This pen is not worth a damn. When it comes to keeping score, she's not worth a damn.

to meddle with something; to play with something, trying to get it to work or work better. Let me tinker around with it for a while and see if I can get it to work. Please don't tinker with the controls.

to have value Kids in this city aren't getting an education that's worth a damn. I haven't asked enough people for my research to be worth a tinker's damn, but everyone I've talked to thinks it's a good idea.

to not be interested in or worried about something or someone (often + question word) I don't give a tinker's cuss what she thinks, I'll do what I want! He's never given a tinker's damn for me, or for any of the family.

Also, not worth a plugged nickel or red cent or bean or hill of beans or fig or straw or tinker's damn . Worthless, as in That car isn't worth a damn, or My new tennis racket is not worth a plugged nickel. As for the nouns here, a damn or curse is clearly of no great value (also see not give a damn); a plugged nickel in the 1800s referred to a debased five-cent coin; a cent denotes the smallest American coin, which was red when made of pure copper (1800s); a bean has been considered trivial or worthless since the late 1300s (Chaucer so used it), whereas hill of beans alludes to a planting method whereby four or five beans are put in a mound (and still are worthless); and both fig and straw have been items of no worth since about 1400. A tinker's dam, first recorded in 1877, was a wall of dough raised around a spot where a metal pipe is being repaired so as to hold solder in place until it hardens, whereupon the dam is discarded. However, tinker's damn was first recorded in 1839 and probably was merely an intensification of "not worth a damn," rather than having anything to do with the dam.

Try to repair, work aimlessly or unskillfully with, as in He tinkered with the engine all day but it still wouldn't start. This idiom, first recorded in 1658, alludes to working as a tinker, that is, mending metal utensils.

Something of no value. Itinerant tinsmiths known as tinkers were roughand- ready men who saw no reason to watch their language. They swore so frequently that their curse words had no value for emphasis or anything else, and so something that was said to be worth a tinker's damn had no merit or value at all.