Chops for the Dots

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Catherine from Plano, Texas.

Hi, Catherine, welcome.

Hi, Catherine, how you doing?

Hi, I’m pretty good.

What’s going on?

Well, a friend of mine a few weeks ago posted something on Facebook about a commercial that he thought was really fun.

And I agreed, and I posted that I thought the actor who played the woman had, you know, really awesome chops.

And then later, it kept coming back, and I kept saying, why do we say chops?

It used to be from music or jazz or something, but I’m using it now to talk about someone with acting skills.

And I thought, who could tell me about this?

And then I thought of you.

Yes, we can.

What was she doing in the commercial that was so great?

Well, she just had very good expressions and delivery.

And the other thing I was thinking about was she was also a little bit younger.

So it wasn’t like she was vastly experienced in terms of time.

She was a younger person, but she seemed to have a really good grasp of what she was there to do,

And she did it so well that we all thought it was effective.

And Catherine, are you a musician yourself?

Well, I used to be in the high school band.

What did you play?

I played the clarinet.

They always need clarinets, right?

Did you get steered into the clarinet section?

I was a flute player myself.

Oh, yay.

Well, there’s a history here, and you will probably have a eureka moment when I tell you this.

In the 1500s and 1600s, chops was a slang term for your face or a part of your face, your lips, your mouth.

So you might say, close your chops, your tongue is hanging out or something like that.

And then this use of chops as a slang word for the face or the lips or the mouth kind of faded,

But it stuck around in black American English.

So by the time the jazz era came around, as you noted,

You could talk about chops if you were a musician,

Particularly if you played a wind instrument or a brass instrument.

And in that business, having good chops meant that your embouchure was good.

The way that you held the instrument to your mouth, particularly if you had strength.

I mean, if you could really blow, as they put it at the time, right?

You had good embouchure, and then you had chops.

And then to have good chops kind of showed up in the rest of the band,

The piano player and the stand-up bass and the guitarist or whoever,

And it spread from there.

And then it left music and showed up in sports and other arenas

Where it meant as it does today, which if you have good chops

Or if you just have playing, you don’t even have to qualify it.

If you have chops, you’re very good.

Well, thanks for the props for the chops.

Yeah, and so in the jazz era, there was a quote that I really loved.

If you ain’t got the chops for the dots, ain’t nothing happening.

And that meant if you were really good at playing a trumpet, then you were great.

But if you weren’t, then nothing, the band was going to go nowhere.

Yeah, you probably remember when if you didn’t practice a whole lot, then your embouchure just went all the heck.

Right, because you’ve got to practice those muscles, right?

They go slack fast, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So now we use it just to demonstrate someone’s level of skill.

Yeah, Grant just demonstrated his linguistic chops, wouldn’t you say?

And it doesn’t have to do with musical chops.

It’s in all varieties of skilled areas now.

In general, it means you are above average or you are unexpectedly good,

Which sounds like the use that you made when you were talking about this actress in the television commercial.

She was good beyond her age, right?

Yes, yes, exactly.

You’ve hit it.

Well, that was awesome.

Thank you for clearing that up.

Thanks for calling, Catherine.

Good luck.

I appreciate it.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

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