There is a strange scene in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1 where Hal, the future King Henry V, teases a dimwirted bartender by insisting on talking with him even as the man is being beckoned by an impatient customer in another room; Hal’s joke, such as it is, is to see how many times he can get the poor bartender to cry out to the other customer, “Anon, anon!” meaning “Right away, right away!” The word bartender, though, does not actually appear in the scene. Rather, the butt of the joke is called a skinker or rather an under-skinker, the adjective under meaning that he is an apprentice in the position. In the sixteenth century, the job of a skinker, like the skinkers themselves, was simple: draw beer from a barrel into a customer’s cup (making sure to dilute the beer to increase profits), and then carry it to the customer. Between brawls, skinkers would also make sure that there was an adequate supply of pickled herring, a snack designed to increase customers’ thirst. In origin, skinker derives from the verb skink, which in turn evolved from the Old English scencan, meaning to pour. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that skinker is still current, but this seems optimistic: no bartender that I know of would take kindly to being called a skinker.