Thin Versus Skinny

Is there a difference in meaning between those words to people?  Without looking them up, does one have the connotation of, “not overweight” while the other one conveys the thought of, ‘underweight’  I’m not altogether sure what the difference is to me, but I had an epiphany just now and decided to write about it here.  

This summer we were in New Jersey visiting my brother-in-law’s family for our annual summer vacation.  After dinner one night my husband and I went for a walk on the board walk and witnessed an unusual phenomenon.  There was a double rainbow visible off shore to the South.    We took a few pictures and kept walking.   Af few minutes later we realized there was also a rainbow visible at the other end of the arc, up the shore to the North.

We decided to take a picture using the panorama feature of the iPhone’s camera.   Just before taking the shot my husband said, “okay, do this” and then told me how to get in the picture more than once.   He started panning from the left and caught me in-frame.   As he panned right I ran around behind him and jumped into the picture mid-pan.   As he passed by me a second time I ran around him again and got into the picture at the double rainbow end.

The picture was great.   You could see all three sections of the rainbow and I magically had two siblings.    I had forgotten about the picture until yesterday when I found it looking for something else.   My husband said, “you should use that as your Facebook header photo.”   I thought about it but wasn’t sure, mostly because I’m Facebook shy and don’t post much and rarely put up pictures.

Tonight I brought up the picture again and had a thought about it.   As I was looking at the three versions of me I had the thought, “I look thin!”   This was a positive thought, because at about that time I had finished my weight loss plan and had hit my target weight.   I was running almost every day and I felt great.    I’ve always been fairly thin though.   It was at that point that I had a second thought which was, “will people think I’m skinny?”  

Is ‘skinny’ a negative term in our society today?

The Big Boy Update:  My daughter and I had plans after school today.   I asked my son if he wanted to help and he said no.   I told him he could play Mario 3D world (or Mario Maker) while we prepared her favor bags if he wanted to.   Afterwards when I told him he had to stop playing he wasn’t angry.  He didn’t get upset and he was very kind during dinner.   So it doesn’t seem all screen time makes him an angry monster.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and I prepared her favor bags for her upcoming birthday party.   She wanted to stamp them, selected stamps and ink and placed the stamps quite accurately.   She then put one of each of the items we’d selected into each bag.   At the end she wasn’t sure we had enough in the white paper bags (we were using luminary paper bags) so she selected adding a piece of white chalk to each bag.   She said that would be “plenty” for each friend after the chalk was added.