“Chip on the shoulder” is an American idiom for someone combative and easily offended, likely due to resentment or insecurity. Its origin lies in 19th century America, where placing a chip on the shoulder was a challenge to a fight. The phrase survived the metaphor but lost its literal meaning.
Having a “chip on the shoulder” is an American idiom first recorded in the 19th century. Someone who has a chip on their shoulder is combative, prickly, and quick to take offense. This phrase can describe someone who is in a bad mood and looking for a fight or someone who is combative by nature. It is often associated with resentment and a feeling of resentment or insecurity.
The origin of the phrase “chip on the shoulder” seems to lie in the social customs of 19th century America. During this period, placing a piece of wood or a small stone on the shoulder was a way of challenging someone else to a fight. By clearing the chip, an opponent accepted the challenge.
In the 1820s and 1830s, the expression appears in literal terms in American writing. The custom of placing a splinter or stone on the shoulder as a challenge seems to have been known from this period. In 1855, the Weekly Oregonian used the first recorded instance of the phrase figuratively, to describe someone looking for a fight rather than someone who literally had a stick on his shoulder.
An alternative explanation for the phrase is that it dates back to 18th-century England. According to this explanation, shipyard workers and employers argued over a traditional practice whereby carpenters were allowed to take home excess pieces of wood, or “chips.” An account of an 18th construction strike includes a description of workers leaving the construction site “with chips on their backs”. This phrase is very close to the expression “a chip on the shoulder”, but there is no record of the phrase being used in a figurative sense until the 1756th century; it does not appear again in Britain until the 1919s. The appearance of the expression in this report is therefore likely to be a coincidence.
The “chip on the shoulder” idiom is an example of a phrase that has survived the metaphor that originally motivated it. Speakers of American idiomatic English all know that a person with a pat on the back is one who is easily antagonized and takes any criticism or contradiction as a provocation. However, the practice of placing an actual piece of wood on the shoulder as a challenge to a fist fight has long since died out, making the phrase baffling to anyone unfamiliar with its history.
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