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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Heard on NPR this morning, “not by a long shot”.
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I think both expressions mean much the same thing – I’ve often heard them used interchangeably – am I missing something here?
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World Wide Words: Not by a long chalk
A British expression, ‘Not by a long chalk’, puzzles a questioner. It comes from that British institution, the public house.
www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-not2.htm
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-not2.htm
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I just heard “not by a long chalk” on a British book on tape and rewound a couple of times because I always thought the expression was “not by a long shot”. Is the expression “long shot” an eggcorn of “long chalk” or does it come from somewhere else?
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Is this primarily a British expression? I’ve never heard “by a long chalk.” So many of our expressions across the pond (British and American) seem to be similar but oh so different. When I hear the expression, I picture a child writing with a long piece of chalk and it breaking as she applies too much pressure to a chalkboard or of gripping the chalk too far up and making a mess of her writing because of it.
“By a long shot” to me presents the image of a marksman at a long distance trying to hit his mark, though the meaning as it is used (as I have heard it) means something more like “not even close.” More obscurely I picture a gambler playing long odds (though that is probably my own mental eggcorn).
Last edited by JonW719 (2007-11-01 13:14:40)
Feeling quite combobulated.
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Following the link that jorkel provided, could it be that the “long chalk” is the diagonal chalk line that strikes through four vertical lines, itself being the fifth line of that group? In other words, “not by a long chalk” might indicate that someone is more than five points behind their opponent. Just a thought (and, I know, this doesn’t shed any light on the egg corn.)
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Jorkel provided a link to a post on this by Michael Quinions over at his World Wide Words blog. Quinions is pretty careful, so let’s just get his post up here. I’ve given each paragraph in the original a paragraph here.
[Q] From Kriss Buddle, UK: “Where does the expression not by a long chalk come from?â€
[A] This mainly British expression means “not by any meansâ€, “not at all†and often turns up in conventional expressions such as they weren’t beaten yet, not by a long chalk.
It goes back to the days in which a count or score of almost any kind was marked up on a convenient surface using chalk. At a pub or ale house this might be a note of the amount of credit you had been given (often called the chalk in the early nineteenth century), which Charles Dickens refers to in Great Expectations: “There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen, with some alarmingly long chalk scores in it on the wall at the side of the door, which seemed to me to be never paid off.â€
But the expression almost certainly comes from the habit of using chalk in such establishments to mark the score in a game, a habit which now survives in British pubs mainly in the game of darts. A chalk was the name given a single mark or score, so that a person might explain that somebody or other had lost a game of skittles by four chalks or you needed 31 chalks to finish. If your opponent had a long chalk, a big score, he was doing well.
The expression indicates a determined intention to continue, though the game is going against you. Your opponent may have a long chalk, but you’re not done for yet.
For the earliest example, we must turn yet again to Thomas Chandler Haliburton of Nova Scotia, who included it several times in his book The Clockmaker of 1835: “Depend on it, Sir, said he, with a most philosophical air, this Province is much behind the intelligence of the age. But if it is behind us in that respect, it is a long chalk ahead on us in others.â€
A related expression is not by a long shot. However, this is originally a military idiom, based on the difficulty of hitting a target at long range, hence an outside chance.
I wish MQ’s evidence included a use of the term in a non-figurative sense, so I could be sure that people really were using “a long chalk” to refer to a “big score.” He does however confirm what we puzzled Yanks had already guessed: this is largely British.
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