the.com/dicker
To haggle over small stuff, as if pennies were principles.
means To bargain back and forth over price or terms, usually in a petty, drawn-out way.
from Likely traces to the Latin 'decem' (ten), via trade in hides sold by the 'dicker' — a bundle of ten animal skins, used as a unit of exchange along old frontier and Roman-adjacent trade routes. Over time the noun for the bundle slid into a verb for the haggling that went into pricing it — so the word for a unit of trade became the word for arguing over trade itself.
- origin
- from dicker, a unit of ten hides
- usage
- peaked in flea-market and used-car diplomacy
- tone
- implies petty, drawn-out bargaining
- kin
- related to dicker-trading in old leather markets