What Does Chip on Your Shoulder Mean
Chip on your shoulder
What'southward the meaning of the phrase 'Chip on your shoulder'?
A 'scrap on your shoulder' is a perceived grievance or sense of inferiority.
What'south the origin of the phrase 'Bit on your shoulder'?
There are several possible explanations of how a 'chip on your shoulder' originated, not least because the word chip has several meanings.
Nosotros aren't concerned here near the foodstuff that the English call chips and the Americans phone call chips, not the foodstuff that the Americans call chips and the English language call crisps. The pregnant that we are concerned with here is an before ane, namely 'a small-scale piece of wood, every bit might be chopped, or chipped, from a larger cake'.
The phrase 'a chip on one'due south shoulder' is reported as originating with the nineteenth century U.S. practice of spoiling for a fight by carrying a chip of woods on one's shoulder, daring others to knock information technology off. This suggested derivation has more than the whiff of folk-etymology most it. Anyone who might exist inclined to uncertainty that origin might be interested in an alternative theory. This relates to working practices in the British Imperial Dockyards in the 18th century. In Solar day and Lunn's The History of Work and Labour Relations in the Imperial Dockyards, 1999, the authors report that the standing orders of the [Royal] Navy Board for August 1739 included this ruling:
"Shipwrights to be allowed to bring [fries] on their shoulders most to the dock gates, in that location to be inspected by officers".
The permission to remove surplus timber for firewood or building material was a substantial perk of the chore for the dock workers. A subsequent standing order, in May 1753, ruled that only fries that could be carried nether one arm were allowed to be removed. This limited the amount of timber that could exist taken and the shipwrights were non all-time pleased near the revoking of their previous benefit. Iii years later, for this and other reasons, they went on strike.
Hattendorf, Knight et al., in British Naval Documents, 1204 - 1960, record a letter which was sent by Chatham Dockyard officers to the Navy Lath, relating to the 1756 dockyard workers' strike at Chatham. The letter of the alphabet records a comment made past a shipwright who was stopped at the yard's gates:
"Are not the chips mine? I will non lower them."
It goes on to written report that "Immediately the primary body pushed on with their fries on their shoulders."
That's a nice story and does connect an incident apropos chips and shoulders with a belligerent attitude. We demand to exist a little wary of swallowing that derivation whole however. The trouble with information technology is that the phrase isn't known to be recorded in print in England with its figurative meaning anywhere near the 18th century. The first such tape by an English author doesn't seem to be until the 1930s in fact, in Somerset Maugham'south Admirer in the Parlour:
"He was a human with a chip on his shoulder. Everyone seemed in a conspiracy to slight or hurt him."
A gap of near 200 years between the utilise of a phrase and the incident that supposedly spawned it in the same state is hard to explicate. In my humble stance, the 'chips on shoulders' report dating from 1756 refer literally to merely that, chips carried on shoulders. There'due south no evidence at all to propose 'a chip on i's shoulder' existed as a figurative phrase until the 19th century.
The confrontational challenge to knock a flake of wood off someone'due south shoulder does after all appear to be the correct derivation. Coexisting evidence is all we accept to go on here, but that conspicuously points to a 19th century US coinage. The earliest printed citations that I can observe that refer to chips on shoulders are all from America, which the OED states quite firmly to be the source of the phrase; for example:
The American writer and historian James Kirke Paulding's Messages from the South, 1817:
"A human being rode furiously past on horseback, and swore he'd be d----d if he could not lick whatever man who dared to crook his elbow at him. This, information technology seems, is equivalent to throwing the glove in days of yore, or to the adolescent custom of knocking a fleck off the shoulder."
In 1830 the New York paper The Long Isle Telegraph printed this:
"When ii churlish boys were determined to fight, a chip would be placed on the shoulder of one, and the other demanded to knock information technology off at his peril."
The precise phrase 'a fleck on his shoulder' appears a little subsequently, in the Vermont newspaper The North Star, November 1952:
The carry of both these gentlemen [the US abolitionists Theodore Parker and William Garrison] puts us in mind of the Irishman who went through town with a flake on his shoulder, anxious to take a fight, and shouting, "Arrah, will none of ye knock the chip off me shoulder!"
What Does Chip on Your Shoulder Mean
Posted by: kimberlylovervicieds.blogspot.com
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