I posted the origin of ‘sairfingers’ a few years ago in Sairfingers’ Learning Log so I’ll copy and paste the entry across here.
Back in the Summer of 1990 (not ‘69) I was on a campsite in France with my wife and 2 kids. We were touring around with our caravan and ended up near Sarlat in the Dordogne region.
Anyone who has been camping/caravanning in France will know that the campsites are full of Dutch people and I met up with a bunch of Dutch guys. They all spoke great English so communication wasn’t a problem. They had brought their guitars on holiday with them so there were regular singalongs in the bar and swimming pool area etc. So my interest in guitar was reignited some 20 years after my initial short lived introduction as a teenager.
One of the guitar players was suffering from painful fingertips as he was not a regular player. Much to my amusement he described this in Dutch as ‘zere vinger’, but it was pronounced as ‘sair finger’ (finger pronounced as in singer).
Had our national bard Robert Burns ever written a poem about a sore finger in addition to those for which he is famous like ‘Tae a moose’ (that’s mouse, not the large North American animal) he would undoubtedly have used old Scots and written and spoken it as ‘sair finger’.
Unfortunately when I returned home the guitar spark, like many post holiday plans, was extinguished by work and family commitments.
I never forgot the Dutch guy and his sore fingers and on the 21st March 2018 (I checked my profile) when I joined Justin guitar and needed a nickname and certainly had sore fingers from playing for the previous few weeks, ‘sairfingers’ was born.