… big banana feet… See first comment for the full rhyme.
Once more, a blast or two from the past when English (and Scottish) were the only languages I spoke.
Let’s start with the word skin itself. In English, the word skin isn’t even comfortable in its own skin. Old English actually borrowed the word from the Scandinavian languages, like the early Scandinavian skinn. Skin originally referred to the hides of smaller animals and was later applied to humans.
Skinny is of course thin and a Skinny Malinky is a tall, thin person. You can be thin-skinned if you’re easy to upset (Dutch people, however, have long toes) and thick-skinned if you’re slow to upset. You can just manage to do something – by the skin of your teeth and if you don’t care – it’s no skin off your nose. If you’ve had a skinful, you’re very drunk, so drunk that you might go skinny-dipping (swimming naked) and if you do, I hope someone jumps in and saves your skin.
You can get under someone’s skin by annoying them and personally, insects make my skin crawl.
A skinflint is mean and miserly, originally applied to some money-grubbing individual who would skin a flint—try to strip a small chunk of the hard stone—in the name of profit.
Luckily for Skinny Malinky, beauty is only skin deep.