Learn English – What ever happened to “fink”

Phink is a jocular misspelling of fink, which in US slang of the 50s and 60s signified generally a despicable person and specifically a traitor or sneak, someone who betrays his criminal confederates to the police.

A common intensive form was rat fink,… @StoneyB

World Wide Words tells us that fink has three different meanings

The first one recorded is of an unpleasant or contemptible person (sometimes in the extended form ratfink), but the more common one today is that of someone who informs on people to the authorities. There’s also a third sense, now dated, of a strike breaker.

Michael Quinion, the author, suggests that the term is derived from 19th century German slang, meaning "finch", used to describe undergraduates who were not members of a college fraternity. The meaning of fink then extended to “not one of us”.

Today in the 21st century, you just don't hear fink or stinker being used in American movies or in cable TV shows, let alone by rap or hip-hop artists.

I suspect that the younger generations replaced the euphemism "fink" with its more direct and taboo counterparts, motherfucker, son of a bitch, and similar ilk. Less derogatory and offensive terms would be: scoundrel, villain, rogue, rascal, brute, animal, weasel, snake, monster, ogre, wretch, devil, good-for-nothing, reprobate, wrongdoer, evil-doer (courtesy of Oxford Dictionaries). Interestingly, the same synonyms are suggested for both fink and motherfucker.

The term "fink" sounds twee and almost charming in comparison, a suitable utterance for a child but much less so for an adult. In fact, Batfink was a popular children's cartoon character, on both sides of the Atlantic, the TV cartoon was produced from April 1966 to October 1967 and enjoyed a cult following when it was repeated during the 1970s and '80s.

The American English corpus, via Google Ngram, seems to concur that "fink" lost its derogatory appeal: a fink (blue), a stinker (red), son of a bitch (green), a motherfucker (yellow), a bastard (dark blue). The noun form fink is way at the bottom, followed closely by stinker, and surprisingly, motherfucker.

If we focus our attention on the last three terms, and add the verb "is", i.e. is a fink, Google Ngram should avoid those instances where the author's name, A. Fink, is cited. The expression “is a stinker” seems to have peaked in the 1950s while that of “is a fink” in the early 1970s. Both terms were surpassed in frequency by the infinitely more offensive insult, motherfucker, around 1985. The same time that coincided with the Generation X's coming of age.

_{Credit is due to the following users whose comments helped improve the answer: @Lambie, @Hot Licks, @Mitch, and @user3293056}