Re: I have a chip both shoulders

Mike Lyle <mike_lyle_uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Donna Richoux wrote:
> > Will <billrigby@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> >> I don't agree with M-W on this. To have a chip on one's shoulder
> >> means to feel, usually without justification, that one has been
> >> short-changed or slighted in some way. That such a sense of
> >> grievance is often accompanied by a "challenging or belligerent
> >> attitude" is not the point - the point is the "chippiness" arising
> >> from the imagined inadequacy.
> >>
> > What is that you think "chippiness" means? I'm not familiar with that
> > word.
> >
> > There is no doubt about the origin of this phrase. As Michael
> > Quinion says,
> >
> > Very occasionally, someone asks about a phrase for
> > which a good explanation exists. This is one of
> > those rare cases. Let us pause a moment to
> > celebrate, and then turn to the Long Island
> > Telegraph of Hempstead, Long Island, for 20 May
> > 1830. On page three it says: "When two churlish boys
> > were determined to fight, a chip would be placed on
> > the shoulder of one, and the other demanded to knock
> > it off at his peril".[...]
> >
> > You appear to be saying that in modern use, the belligerence has sunk
> > to mere sullenness, but that's not really a surprise.
>
> I agree with Will that it's possible to be belligerent without having
> a chip on one's shoulder: the chip is always, in my experience,
> associated with a sense of injustice. It gets complicated, in that
> the sense of injustice may not be clearly recognised by the chippy
> person: you can tell somebody he has a chip on his shoulder, and
> he'll generally deny it. I don't feel I can explain this clearly.

So are you and Will-billrigby saying there is a modern UK term "chippy"
and "chippiness" that refers to this elusive sense of grievance?
>
> I'm surprised MQ is so confident about that rather strange-sounding
> explanation: it feels a bit like folk etymology to my mind.

It's not like that 1830 citation is the *only* mention! Maybe twice,
I've come across the literal custom included in old novels, with boys
challenging each other to a fight. One would put a stone on his shoulder
and dare the other to knock it off (which I notice would mean that that
person swung first, giving the provoker later deniability.)

Not *every* colorful word-history is bogus. Just most of them.

....I just looked a few places to see if I could find the custom cited
literally. No luck, but I found some early 20th-century metaphorical
ones:

William Roscoe Thayer, _Theodore Roosevelt_ 1919.

The idea that he was truculent or pugnacious, that he went about
with a chip on his shoulder, that he loved fighting for the sake of
fighting, was, however, a mistake.

The Valley of the Moon by London, Jack London, 1913:

That'd make me have a chip on my shoulder an' lookin' for trouble,
which is a poor way to do business.

> He knows
> more than I do, of course; but did anybody, for example, ever
> actually trail his coat? (OK, maybe they did it all the time...)

I'm not at all familiar with that. Political coattails, yes.

--
Best -- Donna Richoux

.

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