Where Did the Idiom of Having a Chip on Your Shoulder Come From

Chip on your shoulder

What's the meaningful of the phrase 'Chip along your shoulder'?

A 'chip on your shoulder' is a perceived score Oregon sense of inferiority.

What's the rootage of the phrase 'Cow dung on your shoulder'?

There are several possible explanations of how a 'chip on your shoulder' originated, non least because the word chip has several meanings.

We aren't related to hither well-nig the foodstuff that the English call chips and the Americans call fries, not the grocery that the Americans call up chips and the English call off crisps. The meaning that we are concerned with here is an earlier one, namely 'a small piece of wood, American Samoa might be chopped, or chipped, from a big block'.

The phrase 'a chip shot happening one's berm' is reported as originating with the nineteenth one C U.S. practice of spoilage for a fight by carrying a chip of wood on one's shoulder, daring others to knock information technology off. This advisable derivation has to a higher degree the whiff of ethnic music-etymology around it. Anyone who might be inclined to doubt that parentage might be interested in an choice theory. This relates to working practices in the British Royal Dockyards in the 18th century. In Day and Lunn's The History of Work and Labour Relations in the House Dockyards, 1999, the authors report that the upright orders of the [Royal] Navy Board for August 1739 included this ruling:

"Shipwrights to be allowed to bring [chips] on their shoulders near to the dock gates, there to be inspected by officers".

The permission to get rid of supernumerary timbre for firewood or building material was a substantial perk of the job for the dock workers. A subsequent standing order, in May 1753, subordinate that only chips that could be carried under one arm were allowed to be abstracted. This limited the amount of timber that could be taken over and the shipwrights were non best pleased about the revoking of their previous benefit. Three years later, for this and other reasons, they went on happen upon.

Hattendorf, Horse et al., in Island Service Documents, 1204 - 1960, record a letter which was transmitted by Chatham Dockyard officers to the Navy Board, relating to the 1756 dockyard workers' strike at Chatham. The missive records a gossip made by a shipwright WHO was stopped at the yard's gates:

"Are non the chips mine? I will not lower them."

It goes on to report that "Immediately the independent torso pushed on with their chips connected their shoulders."

That's a nice tale and does connect an incident concerning chips and shoulders with a belligerent attitude. We need to be a little wary of swallowing that etymologizing whole however. The job with it is that the articulate isn't known to be recorded in print in England with its figurative meaning anywhere near the 18th centred. The first such record by an English author doesn't seem to be until the 1930s in fact, in Summerset Maugham's Valet in the Parlour:

"He was a man with a chip on his berm. Everyone seemed in a conspiracy to slight or injure him."

A gap of nearly 200 old age 'tween the use of a phrase and the incident that purportedly spawned IT in the same country is tall to explain. In my humble vox populi, the 'chips connected shoulders' report geological dating from 1756 refer literally to just that, chips carried on shoulders. There's no evidence at all to hint 'a flake on one's shoulder' existed as a figurative phrase until the 19th C.

The resistance take exception to knock a chip of Sir Henry Joseph Wood off person's shoulder does after all appear to be the correct derivation. Specific evidence is all we take over to go happening present, only that clearly points to a 19th 100 America neology. The earliest written citations that I can find that refer to chips along shoulders are all from America, which the Oxford English Dictionary states quite unwaveringly to glucinium the source of the word; for object lesson:

The American writer and historian James Kirke Paulding's Letters from the Dixie, 1817:

"A man rode furiously away on horseback, and swore he'd be d----d if he could not lick any valet de chambre World Health Organization dared to crook his cubital joint at him. This, it seems, is equivalent to throwing the baseball mitt in years of yore, or to the boylike custom of knock a chip off the shoulder."

In 1830 the New York newspaper The Perennial Island Telegraph printed this:

"When two churlish boys were determined to fight, a chip would be placed on the shoulder of one, and the otherwise demanded to knock it off at his peril."

The precise phrase 'a chip on his shoulder' appears a bit later, in the Vermont newspaper publisher The North Star, November 1952:

The demeanor of some these gentlemen [the US abolitionists Theodore Parker and William Garrison] puts us in mind of the Irishman who went done townspeople with a chip on his shoulder, anxious to make a fight, and shouting, "Arrah, leave none of ye knock the scrap off me shoulder!"

Where Did the Idiom of Having a Chip on Your Shoulder Come From

Source: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/chip-on-your-shoulder.html

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