Origin and history of trashy

c. 1400, "fallen leaves, brush, and twigs used as kindling;" also "things of little use or value" collectively; "waste, refuse, dross; something broken or torn to bits, tattered garment;" London Guildhall inventories and accounts mid-14c, list trasshnayles, presumably the same element but the sense is unclear. It is perhaps from a Scandinavian source (compare Old Norse tros "rubbish, fallen leaves and twigs," Norwegian dialectal trask "lumber, trash, baggage," Swedish trasa "rags, tatters"), but ultimately of obscure origin. Late 13c. in English as a surname.

In reference to worthless writings or ideas, by 1540s. Applied to ill-bred persons or groups by 1604 ("Othello"), and especially of poor whites in the U.S. South by 1831. The Scandinavian words also often have extended senses of "slovenly or worthless fellow."

Applied to domestic refuse or garbage from 1906 (American English). Trash-can is attested from 1914. To trash-talk someone or something is by 1989.

very common adjective suffix, "full of, covered with, or characterized by" the thing expressed by the noun, Middle English -i, from Old English -ig, from Proto-Germanic *-iga-, from PIE -(i)ko-, adjectival suffix, cognate with elements in Greek -ikos, Latin -icus (see -ic). Germanic cognates include Dutch, Danish, German -ig, Gothic -egs.

It was used from 13c. with verbs (drowsy, clingy), and by 15c. with other adjectives (crispy). Chiefly with monosyllables; with more than two the effect tends to become comedic.

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Variant forms in -y for short, common adjectives (vasty, hugy) helped poets after the loss of grammatically empty but metrically useful -e in late Middle English. Verse-writers adapted to -y forms, often artfully, as in Sackville's "The wide waste places, and the hugy plain" (and the huge plain would have been a metrical balk).

After Coleridge's criticism of it as archaic artifice, poets gave up stilly (Moore probably was last to make it work, with "Oft in the Stilly Night"), paly (which Keats and Coleridge himself had used) and the rest.

Jespersen ("Modern English Grammar," 1954) also lists bleaky (Dryden), bluey, greeny, and other color words, lanky, plumpy, stouty, and the slang rummy. Vasty survives, he writes, only in imitation of Shakespeare; cooly and moisty (Chaucer, hence Spenser) he regards as fully obsolete. But in a few cases he notes (haughty, dusky) they seem to have supplanted shorter forms.