"Bargaining Chip": Antedating & Mystery

[Joanne M. Despres]

Although writing etymologies is not my chief responsibility, I can
pretty confidently vouch for Fred Shapiro's assessment of the value
of etymological hypotheses based solely upon conjecture, with no
factual basis to support them.  Merriam-Webster's etymology files
are chock full of colorful, sometimes superficially plausible, but
almost always mutually contradictory etymological conjectures.
Many of these appear newspapers and magazines, where they are
passed along without question.  Dealing with this material on a
regular basis would make it obvious to anyone that it's very easy
(and apparently very satisfying) to invent an internally consistent
after-the-fact hypothesis for the origin of a word or phrase.  The
bewildering variety of these hypotheses also makes it patently
obvious that most of them are wrong!

Joanne Despres