{"id":10246,"date":"2012-05-07T23:24:45","date_gmt":"2012-05-08T06:24:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/?p=10246"},"modified":"2015-05-07T02:55:45","modified_gmt":"2015-05-07T09:55:45","slug":"where-did-the-expression-chump-change-come-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/2012\/05\/where-did-the-expression-chump-change-come-from\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Did the Expression “Chump Change” Come From"},"content":{"rendered":"
E. Bondine asks:\u00a0 Where\u00a0 did the slang “chump change” originate?<\/div>\n

\"Now<\/a>The phrase “chump change” first popped up in the mid-20th century, initially used primarily by African Americans to mean similar to what it does today, “a small or trivial amount of money”.\u00a0 As to how those two words ended up being joined to form the phrase “chump change”, we have to go back a little further to look at the evolution of the word ‘chump’.<\/p>\n

‘Chump’ showed up in English around the 18th century and probably was an agglutination of the two words ‘chunk’ and ‘lump’, as it originally meant a “lump of wood”.\u00a0 Fast forward about a century and it started to take on a second meaning, “blockhead, fool, gullible person”.\u00a0 Today ‘loser’ and ‘idiot’ has also been added to that.<\/p>\n

From that, how ‘chump’\u00a0 and ‘change’ became conjoined to mean “a small amount of money” starts to make sense, namely “an amount of money only a chump [fool] would think was a lot”, particularly in the beginning often referring to the low wages African Americans received for some job over what others, such as white people, might make for the same job: “I’m getting paid chump change for this”.\u00a0 “Chump change” has since evolved to mean any trivial amount of money, whether in the context of wages or how much something was worth or not, and further whether the amount is actually trivial or just trivial to a certain person, such as in the case of a few thousand dollars being “chump change” to someone like Warren Buffet.<\/p>\n

If you’re curious, the word ‘change’ original derives from the Latin ‘cambire’ meaning “to exchange or barter”, which in turn came from the Proto-Indo-European root ‘kamb-‘, meaning “to bend, crook”.\u00a0 The jump between the two meanings is thought to come from “to bend” evolving into “to turn” or “to change”.\u00a0 Around the 13th century, ‘cambire’ gave rise to the Old French ‘changier’, meaning “to alter”.\u00a0 In the 17th century, this then took on the added meaning of amount owed back after payment, as in “$3.65 is your change.”<\/p>\nExpand for References<\/span>

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