Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. snobbish, pretentious, putting on airs, also as adv. (see cite 1940).

1924		Rosa Henderson ‘The Basement Blues’ 🎵 The man I love / Got lowdown ways, for true! / Well, I am hincty, and I’m lowdown, too!
1928		Thurman & Rapp Harlem in Coll. Writings (2003) 317: Well, you needn’t get so hincty bout it.
1935		Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail 10 May 8/8: It wasn’t any time at all until a hinkty big black man came around in his fancy clothes and began making sweet talk to Ham’s wife.
1940		E.F. Frazier Negro Youth 99: ‘They [the lighter boys and girls] don’t want to be around you, and they act ‘hinkty’ ’.
1946		Drake & Cayton Black Metropolis 444: One of the most general criticisms of negro merchants is the charge the ‘they are stuck up,’ or ‘hincty’.
1951		Kerouac On the Road (The Orig. Scroll) (2007) 188: Handsome queer boys [...] walked around wetting their eyebrows with hincty fingertips.
1952		L. Hughes Laughing to Keep from Crying 75: ‘She’s too respectable.’ ‘A hinkty hussy!’.
1958		G. Lea Somewhere There’s Music 224: I shouldn’t have got so hincty.
1962		S. Longstreet Flesh Peddlers (1964) 245: Eating garbage out of the tin cans behind the hincy [sic] eating places.
1962		T. Berger Reinhart in Love (1963) 121: And that hincty little chick G. Raven, she give you many a bad time.
1970		L. Meriwether Daddy was a Number Runner 147: None of these stores hire colored, but the help are the hinctiest.
1980		E. Folb Runnin’ Down Some Lines 47: A Tom is anyone who [...] acts hincty, seddity, or uppity.
1992		R.C. Cruz Straight Outta Compton 66: She’s so hincty and seddity that the next thing you know she’ll be trying to make her own perfume.
2001		A. Randall Wind Done Gone 119: He flicked that packet onto my desk in a manner these city Negroes might call ‘hincty,’.

2. a derog. epithet for any black abandoning racial pride in an attempt to ape white manners or styles.

1965		H. Rhodes Chosen Few (1966) 122: You got a lotta nerve bringin’ your fancy-talkin’, northern-raised hincty ass down here and criticizin’ us for what we do.
1969		C. Himes Blind Man with a Pistol (1971) 58: All those hincty bitches fell on those whitey-babies like they was sugar candy.
1980		J.L. Gwaltney Drylongso 220: You know some of those hinkdy black ones treats you wuss than that.

3. see hinky adj.