the.com/shimmy
A dance move so good they named a car defect after it.
means To move or shake the body or shoulders with a quick, wobbling, side-to-side motion — or to wriggle one's whole body through a tight space.
from The dance came first: 'shimmy' was the name of a jazz-era dance involving rapid shaking of the body, popularized in the 1910s–20s. The word itself is generally traced to 'chemise' (the loose undergarment), apparently from the dance's shaking-your-shirt quality — sometimes filtered through the dialect form 'shimmy' meaning a chemise. The mechanical sense, the unsettling side-to-side wobble of front wheels, borrowed the dance's name later for its similar shaky motion.
- origin
- Named from a 1910s ragtime tune
- car trouble
- Front wheels wobble at speed, called death shimmy
- shoulder work
- All shimmy, no hip movement allowed
- censored
- Banned from many 1920s dance halls
- verb life
- Also means wriggling through tight spaces
shimmy shake dance — jazz dance craze of the 1920s where dancers vibrated their shoulders and hips rapidly
shimmy in basketball — stephen curry's signature move where he shakes his shoulders after hitting three-pointers