Page 9 - Southern California Gaming Guide • May 2020

By Maya Winkler
This is the second in a series of articles on gambling idioms that we often use in talking and writing. An idiom is a commonly used expression whose meaning doesn’t relate to the literal meaning of the words, like “painting the town red,” “raining cats and dogs,” etc.
I spent some time teaching English as a Second Language and idioms always caused great confusion to my non-native English-speaking students.
So I’m following suit and going for broke that you don’t know that some of the popular gambling idioms below have their roots in card games and other forms of gambling. Here they are, including their origins.
The Luck of the Draw
You’ve heard it before: “It’s the luck of the draw!” meaning you don’t have any control over something as it depends purely on chance. From the earliest times, people have used lotteries to make decisions by drawing straws, and drawing names out of hats, etc. This practice has placed citizens on juries, drafted men into armies, assigned students to schools, and even selected lifeboat survivors.
Come Up Trumps
This saying doesn’t originate from our President, but means to complete something well or successfully, to have a better performance or outcome than expected. A trump is a playing card that is elevated above its normal rank in trick-taking games like Whist and Bridge. Typically, an entire suit is named a trump suit and those cards then outrank all the others.
The word “trump” derives from “trionfi” or “triumph,” the name of a card game in 1529 that spawned the game Ruff and Honours (sic), which in turn led to
Whist. Trionfi was also the name of the original card game for which tarot cards were designed.
Let the Chips Fall Where They May
This idiom means to allow events to unfold naturally; to accept what occurs without prejudice, worry, or regret. And its derivation was a surprise, as it comes from the world of logging — not from poker. When you chop down a tree using an axe, every time you hit the tree, pieces of wood (chips) scatter. While
you’re cutting, you don’t worry about the chips flying around. You don’t really care where they land.
Down to the Wire
This turn of phrase is used to denote a situation whose outcome is not decided until the very last minute. The origin of the idiom is horse racing. In the late 18th century (no photo-finishes then) a small wire was strung across the track, above the finish line, to help judges determine which horse crossed the line first. An early example of its usage appeared in the July 1889 issue of Scribner’s Magazine, in the story
“How the Derby Was Won.”“As the end of the stand was reached, Timarch worked up to Petrel, and the two raced down to the wire.”
Run the Table
This expression means to win every game or contest. Used most often in sports contexts, its origin is in the game of billiards, where to run the table is to sink every ball. A similar term is “running the rack.” If you start by breaking the rack of balls and then never give your opponent a chance, it’s running the rack.
The Die Is Cast
This phrase means an event has happened or a decision has been made that cannot be changed. It is from games of chance in which the outcome is determined by the throwing of dice or a single die. It was popularized in its use by Julius Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon to begin a civil war in the
Roman Republic, indicating the commission of an irreversible act. To “cross the Rubicon,” a phrase rarely used these days, also has the same meaning.
Call a Spade a Spade
This means to speak frankly and directly about a problem or issue: to tell it like it is. Historians trace the origins of the expression to the Greek phrase “to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough.” Exactly who was the first author of the phrase is lost to history.
Erasmus, the renowned Dutch humanist and classical scholar, translated the phrase “to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough” from Greek to Latin. And in so doing he dramatically changed the phrase to
“call a spade a spade.”
“To call a spade a spade” entered the English
language when Nicholas Udall translated Erasmus in 1542. Famous authors who have used it in their works
include Charles Dickens and W. Somerset Maugham, among others. To be clear, the “spade” in the Erasmus translation has nothing to do with a deck of cards, but rather the gardening tool. In fact, one form of the expression that emerged later was “to call a spade a bloody shovel.”
We use so many gambling expressions everyday. It’s all in the games—well almost all!
Maya Winkler is a bi-coastal cultural observer who plays in and writes about Southern California casinos.
MAY 2020
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
PAGE 9