Right again, McGrath!

The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue:

"schinnie/shinnie/shiny/shinye, n,

(schinnie,)/shinnie/ shiny/ shinye, n, [Obscure. Cf. Gaelic sinteag a skip, a pace, later Scots shinty (1769) thegame, (1773) the stick, 18th century English shinney (1794) the stick.]"

Sinteag and shindig are clearly the same word. So a shindig is a rowdy class of a hooley involving some lepping about the place. The concept of digs on the shins is purely coincidental, but may help explain how the term became popular in the English language.

I've no idea how old the Gypsy word chinda is, and whether all three words derive ultimately from the same or separate sources. Shinty matches could be very robust affairs and they were sometimes used to settle local disputes, so the adoption of the term to refer to quarrels is certainly possible. Or maybe chinda is a much older word whose similarity to sinteag/shindig is also coincidence.

Does anybody know?