Entry · catalog no. 1057

beat up the chops

/ /biːt ʌp ðə tʃɑps/ /BEET-up-thuh-CHOPS

phrase · northeast · 1930s

✓ Verified

To talk at length — to run your mouth. Calloway's gloss: to talk, converse, be loquacious.

“They stood on the corner beating up the chops for an hour.”

Origin & Attribution

Harlem jive, 1930s. Chops meant the mouth and jaw — the same chops a horn player needs — and beating them up meant working them hard. Printed in Calloway's 1938 Hepster's Dictionary alongside the variant beat up the gums. The musician's sense of chops survived into general English; the phrase did not.

1930s

Harlem jive speech

1938

Printed in Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary

mid-century

Falls out of general use

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

Nationwide

northeast · 1930s

Spoken by

Harlem jive and jazz musicians

$BEATUPThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Fading

88 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

25/100

peak cultural energy

Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1938

in the culture

Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.

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By region — how it actually sounds

@auntiereg

Atlanta, GA

@deltasoul

Memphis, TN

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Citations & Sources

■

Cab Calloway — Hepster's Dictionary: A Guide to the Language of Jive — book · 1938

submitted

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