Follow suit - origins of our language...

An ear to the ground. The uncommon origins of some common expression.Today - "Follow suit".
So familiar are most of our everyday phrases from games of chance that we have lost almost all sense of their gambling origin. TO THROW YOUR HAND IN, POKER-FACED, TO HOLD ALL THE ACES,and TO HAVE AN ACE UP ONE'S SLEEVE, TO CALL SOMEONE'S BLUFF, TO TURN UP TRUMPS, TO PLAY ONE'S TRUMP CARD, TO SHOW YOUR HAND AND TO LAY YOUR CARDS ON THE TABLE - these areall commonly used without conjuring up an image of card players, though their origin is obvious when you stop to think about it.

Sometimes the origin is not so obvious, however. If you say of a businessman or fugitive, for example, that he has HAD his chips, the reference to gambling is not immediately clear. But what the phrase would have originally meant was that the person in question had used up all his gambling counters - and for him the game was over. In a similar way, the phrase TO CASH IN ONE'S CHIPS became, in American English, a slangy way of saying "to die".

A related use of CHIP occurs in the phrase TO CHIP IN, meaning either 'to interrupt' or 'to make a contribution'. Originally, to CHIP IN was toplace one's stakes - in the form of counters or CHIPS - on the table in a poker game.

If a friend does something adventurous, you might to be tempted to FOLLOW SUIT, or else you might to decide that adventure is NOT YOUR STRONG SUIT and choose a safer course of action instead. Both phrases refer to suits in a pack of cards: TO FOLLOW SUIT is, literally , to play a card of the same suit as the one that has just been played.

In business dealings one is advised to do everything ABOVE BOARD and not to STACK THE CARDS AGAINST ones's competitors. To STACK the cards here meant originally to arrange the cards in a specific order, rather than randomly, when shuffling or dealing them. And ABOVE BOARD probably originates in the card player's careful practice of keeping his hands above the table - to avoid any suspicion of of switching cards..

For other terms derived from gambling, you can see LEAVE SOMEONE IN THE LURCH, LOAD THE DICE, TURN THE TABLES.

The origins of our language can be seen in other languages, German, French, Latin, even Scandinavian.

Contributor's Note
The origins of language can be extremely interesting