- means trim, neat, well turned out or smart in appearance. It is exemplified in W. D. Latto’s Tammas Bodkin (1864), [She] made me as clean an’ perjink as a new preen, and Neil Munro’s Daft Days (1907), In his clothing he was always trim and tidy, quite perjink, as hereabouts we say. It can refer both to persons and things or places; the Banffshire Journal (9 February 1909) describes a house as jist a perfect pictur’ an’ a’thing aboot the place that clean and perjink. Alternatively, it can mean careful and precise as in Lyon in Mourning (1775): But how came you not to observe the address I gave you literally and perjinkly?
However, there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so, and an excess of perjinkness can be less than attractive, tipping the meaning over into fussiness or priggishness. John Ruskin in Praeterita (1887) writes: She had always what my mother called “perjinketty” ways, which made her typically an old maid in her later years and, in Alison Fleming’s Christina Strang, an overfastidious person is That perjink ye’d think butter wadna melt in her moo.
Perjink can also be used as a noun in the sense of a nicety or fussy detail. If you are on your perjinks, you are on your very best behaviour. John Galt, in Sir Andrew Wylie (1822) gives advice on How to correct the press, and to put in the points, wi’ the lave o’ the wee perjinkities.