the.com/ball and chain
The weight you volunteer to carry because the alternative is carrying nothing worth holding.
means A spouse or partner, especially spoken of as a restriction on one's freedom — or, literally, the shackled iron ball once used to hobble prisoners.
from The literal device is well documented: a heavy iron ball attached by chain to a prisoner's leg, used in prisons and labor gangs to prevent escape, common from the 1800s onward. The figurative leap — calling a spouse a 'ball and chain' — is a 19th-century slang joke, imagining marriage as its own kind of shackle. It's gallows humor wearing a wedding ring: the restraint is the same, only the sentence is supposedly one you asked for.
- origin
- 19th century prison restraint, literal iron ball
- linguistic shift
- slang for spouse by early 1900s
- irony
- usually said fondly, rarely said sincerely
- who says it
- almost always the one not wearing it