Origin Stories: Bilk
“Origin story” is an expression for a superhero’s backstory — for instance, Superman was born on Krypton just before it was destroyed. Many words also have fascinating origin stories. While English comes largely from Latin (and from Greek, and from Latin through French and Spanish, with some Germanic roots and a bit of Sanskrit, etc.), you’ll find that word usage can change quite bit over a couple thousand years.
To bilk is to cheat or defraud.
The con artist bilked many elderly people out of their savings, promising to cure illnesses from diabetes to cancer with only 36 monthly payments of $99.99 “ for which the victims received nothing but useless placebo pills.
Hoodwink, Swindle, Con, and Fleece are all verbs for cheating others. Fleece is perhaps more severe, having the connotation of taking everything from the victim, the way one sheers all of the fleece from a sheep.
Bilk can also be a noun for the person who cheats others (I hope that bilk goes to jail!) More obscurely, bilk can mean to “escape from, frustrate, or thwart.”
The word comes from the card game cribbage, where it means to play a card that keeps an opponent from scoring. Cribbage is a card game that uses a board like the one below to keep score.
