bite one's finger tips

[Dan Goncharoff]

I would have understood the phrase if it said they "have burnt the tips
of their fingers", or even "had the tips of their fingers bit".

DanG

On 5/31/2010 11:58 PM, George Thompson wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society<ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       George Thompson<george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
> Subject:      bite one's finger tips
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>
> This is an expression meaning to lose at the Stock Market, or to make a losing bet, or something.  It does not seem that the OED has anything like it, and I've never encountered it elsewhere.
>
>          The Stocks. -- The winds are not more variable than the price of Stocks as regulated by the Board of Brokers.  ***  So many long faces among the Brokers, we have not seen for some time, -- of course we infer that some of the initiated themselves, have bit the tips of their fingers by buying or selling on time.
>          Morning Courier&  New-York Enquirer, October 22, 1831, p. 2, col. 2
>
> GAT
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>
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