the.com/pluck
Courage borrowed from chickens — the guts to pull taut and let go.
means Spirited courage and resilience under pressure — the nerve to keep going when things get hard.
from Pluck started as a literal word for pulling or plucking, and by the early 1800s it had slid into boxing slang: a fighter's 'pluck' was his heart, lungs, and guts — literally the organs you'd pull out of a slaughtered animal. A boxer with no 'pluck' was gutless in both senses. From there it jumped from the butcher's block to the character trait — having guts came to mean having courage, and 'pluck' stuck as the word for grit and spirit long after people stopped thinking about entrails.
- literal origin
- meant yanking feathers before it meant bravery
- shift in meaning
- 18th century slang turned organ removal into grit
- music use
- guitarists pluck strings, not strum courage
- offal link
- butchers once called heart and liver pluck