"Bargaining Chip": Antedating & Mystery

[Rick H Kennerly]

|o|
|o| I think it's clear from looking at usages of "bargaining chip" and the
|o| less common synonymous term "trading chip" that the essence of a
|o| bargaining chip is that you trade it for something else.  Which doesn't
|o| sound like something from poker.


I'm not sure I follow.  Is it your contention that all of uses of bargaining
chip in conjunction with other poker terminology in the same article are
examples of mixed metaphors?

Just as a little experiment I ran this query through Google-- AND hand, AND
poker, AND stakes +"bargaining chip" to uncover some two dozen articles that
contained all three poker terms as well as the phrase bargaining chip.  I
didn't comb through each one for other extended poker metaphors but I saw
enough to remain skeptical that bargaining chip is not rooted somehow in
poker.  In fact, when searching for just the term bargaining chip without
any poker modifiers, I found few examples that didn't also contain at least
one other card game word--table, dealt, hand, high-stakes, draw, etc.

As I remarked before, when we finally get to bottom of this I think it
probable that we will discover that some writer merely prefixed the word
chip with bargaining to coin the term while casting about in a poker
metaphor.

rhk