第 56 课：A Chip on Your Shoulder: What Are You Going to Do About It?-2
That could be good advice. If you strike high up on a tree with an axe, the chip of wood that is cut off will fall into your eye.
The saying becomes a warning about the dangers of attacking people who are in more important positions than you are.
Later, in the United States, some people would put a real chip on their shoulder as a test.
They wanted to start a fight. They would wait for someone to be brave enough to try to hit it off.
The word chip appears in a number of special American expressions. Another is chip off the old block . This means that a child is exactly like a parent.
This expression goes back at least to the early sixteen hundreds.
The British writer of plays, George Colman, wrote these lines in seventeen sixty-two.
