the.com/gall
The audacity to be wrong confidently and bill you for it anyway.
means Gall is bold, brazen nerve — the shameless audacity to do something presumptuous without a flicker of embarrassment.
from From Old English 'gealla,' meaning bile, the bitter fluid the liver produces — same root as 'gallbladder.' Bile was long thought to govern temperament in old humor-based medicine: too much of it made you bitter, rancorous, or recklessly bold. 'Gall' the organ-fluid and 'gall' the nerve are the same word — the sense just curdled from the physical bitterness into the figurative nerve of someone bitter enough not to care what you think.
- origin
- from bitter liver secretion, literally
- body part
- gallbladder stores the actual bitterness
- usage shift
- bitterness became boldness by 1800s slang
- synonym cluster
- nerve, cheek, chutzpah, same shameless family