I was not wrong on any of the counts, but you are choosing to read selectively. I already said carry on speaking your creole, there's nothing I can do about it.

I am a native speaker of English. I am not from UK or USA. To shimmy up a tree is easily understood by any native speaker in this part of the world as to ascend a tree rapidly and seemingly effortlessly.

Dictionaries are descriptive of the language as used by the authors or editors, they are NOT authoritative.

The ultimate arbiter of "correct" English is the consensus of native speakers. That consensus differs from place to place. If a dictionary disagrees with this consensus the speakers are not incorrect, the dictionary is incorrect or incomplete.

Bemused:I am a native speaker of English. I am not from UK or USA. To shimmy up a tree is easily understood by any native speaker in this part of the world as to ascend a tree rapidly and seemingly effortlessly.

There must be a lot of lizards. It's only time I've ever heard someone say it about a creature climbing a tree.

Bemused:Dictionaries are descriptive of the language as used by the authors or editors, they are NOT authoritative.

Who are not members of society using the language I suppose? The statement is rubbish in any case.

Bemused:The ultimate arbiter of "correct" English is the consensus of native speakers. That consensus differs from place to place. If a dictionary disagrees with this consensus the speakers are not incorrect, the dictionary is incorrect or incomplete.

Really? A consensus of people who say: 'I could care less'...for example?

Polaris:
Hi, Noren--Merriam-Webster is an authoritative source of standard English and is completely reliable. I see that "shinny" was first used in 1672, and that "shimmy" was first used in 1851, so apparently "to shimmy" is simply a more modern version of the word. At any rate, we now know that "to shimmy" is not slang, nor is it colloquial; it is standard, ordinary English, albeit from what we're being told it is not used in Great Britain. Interesting! We've learned something. Not only do we now know how to say it in Esperanto, but we know more about it in English. I love stuff like this!

I'd never heard of "shinning up a tree" before this thread (I've always known it as "shimmying up a tree" ) so I've also learnt something new. Interesting that my experience differs from sudanglo and Vestitor, I wonder whether it's a regional difference in the UK or just different life experiences? But certainly where I grew up (south-west) it was a common way to describe climbing trees.

I no longer care. Whatever I say I'll be contradicted.

Hard for me to fathom how this matters. Evolution of grammar and vocabulary happens equally on both sides of the Atlantic. It always sounds illiterate to me when Brits say "She hadn't got out of bed" versus "She hadn't gotten out of bed", because British English has mostly lost use of past participle "gotten" and conflated it with "got", whereas American English, which is more conservative in some respects, has maintained a distinction between got and gotten. It doesn't make it wrong, just different.

For the purpose of this forum, it doesn't really matter whether the person asking is attempting to translate "He done gone fishin' in the crick" or "He has gone fishing in the river". The principles are the same - translate the meaning, not the words, and the Esperanto may be inherently more or less precise than the source language with regard to the particular words used.

And of course it goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway, a skilled translator should be able to translate not only high-level literary language but also regional and informal language that may not be acceptable to dictionary writers, but nonetheless exists, like it or not.

Vestitor:I no longer care. Whatever I say I'll be contradicted.

Have a go at answering the OP's actual question then, you may find your postings more gratefully received

It may be that "shimmy" came into use as a conflation of "shinny", but that's hardly a reason to derail the thread. Surely the question of how best to translate whatever meaning is thought to be behind "shimmy" (or "shin"/"shinny", if you insist) is the more interesting point of conversation?

erinja:Hard for me to fathom how this matters. Evolution of grammar and vocabulary happens equally on both sides of the Atlantic. It always sounds illiterate to me when Brits say "She hadn't got out of bed" versus "She hadn't gotten out of bed", because British English has mostly lost use of past participle "gotten" and conflated it with "got", whereas American English, which is more conservative in some respects, has maintained a distinction between got and gotten. It doesn't make it wrong, just different.

People do say 'gotten' in the UK, though it gets (related sense) substituted for 'become' in standard speech. A phrase such as 'they've gotten engaged' is very common. There's no 'conflation' of gotten with got, they mean exactly the same thing.

erinja:For the purpose of this forum, it doesn't really matter whether the person asking is attempting to translate "He done gone fishin' in the crick" or "He has gone fishing in the river". The principles are the same - translate the meaning, not the words, and the Esperanto may be inherently more or less precise than the source language with regard to the particular words used.

Obviously. If you know the meaning of the slang in standard English, that is what you will be translating really. If you were truly trying to get the flavour of yokel-speak, translating it into standard Esperanto would be a complete failure. Succeeding would, it seems to me, be completely at odds with aim of the clarity in international communication.

erinja:And of course it goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway, a skilled translator should be able to translate not only high-level literary language but also regional and informal language that may not be acceptable to dictionary writers, but nonetheless exists, like it or not.

See above. When translating slang you come up against all kinds of problems. It is different when translating to another national language, you can mimic it using spoken vernacular of the target language. Is this really wise for Esperanto?
Using a variety of synonyms for shades of meaning is something different: climb/clamber/ scramble etc. That adds colour.

Vestitor:There's no 'conflation' of gotten with got, they mean exactly the same thing.

They don't mean exactly the same thing in US English, that's exactly my point. Each has a use and the meaning carried is different.

See above. When translating slang you come up against all kinds of problems. It is different when translating to another national language, you can mimic it using spoken vernacular of the target language. Is this really wise for Esperanto?
Using a variety of synonyms for shades of meaning is something different: climb/clamber/ scramble etc. That adds colour.

No one was asking for some weird translation or new word to make the Esperanto unclear and incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't speak a particular dialect. The original poster was looking for a clear Esperanto translation for a word that is not considered strange, rude, informal, or dialectical in US English, but in fact a perfectly ordinary word. Therefore a translation should be into ordinary Esperanto. If you need to ask what the word means, then that's fine, people ask for translations of regional terms whose meaning I'm unsure of all the time, and source dialect certainly matters for the meaning.

If you have a doubt you can always ask, "Are you trying to imitate a regional or class-based dialect in the Esperanto or do you want a straight translation of the meaning?" This issue comes up in newspapers all the time when quoting people. Do you quote also their grammatical errors, which may distract from the meaning of what they say, or do you clean up the grammar, even though it isn't someone's exact words? Context matters, and of course if someone is asking for translation help then it is completely reasonable to ask about the context. No need for rude and judgmental comments about people's language usage, it is not the point in a context like this.

erinja:

Vestitor:There's no 'conflation' of gotten with got, they mean exactly the same thing.

They don't mean exactly the same thing in US English, that's exactly my point. Each has a use and the meaning carried is different.

I don't see how that can be. They are from the same word get and express exactly the same thing.

Anyway the basis of U.S. English is a derivative of English from England (especially of a certain period and with certain regional transplantations: Irish, Scots, Northern England etc). It's clear older forms have been incubated whereas they have passed into archaism in England, in the standardised version anyway.

I'm not being rude, I'm being forthright and not buckling under a barrage of dismissal. I still insist that the meaning attributed to 'shimmy' in this thread is a widespread misinterpretation. Just because many people adopt it doesn't make it meaningful, it just makes it widespread.

I'm really going to just leave it though, because there's no persuading some people of anything once they've made their mind up that you're merely a quarrelsome person.