Meaning
A person who is recklessly clumsy, tactless, or heavy-handed in a situation that calls for delicacy, care, or diplomacy, and who therefore risks causing damage - nowadays usually to relationships, negotiations, or feelings rather than to actual porcelain. Nearly always preceded by 'like'. Critical but often affectionate or self-deprecating; informal to neutral register. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The earliest documented use is a punning open letter in the Morning Chronicle (London) of 9 November 1802, which says the war secretary was 'compared... to a Bull in a China Shop'. A comic song of that title, sung by Joseph Grimaldi at Sadler's Wells, was advertised in July 1808 and printed around 1809; Michael Quinion's earliest independent find is The London Review and Literary Journal of January 1812, which praised a pantomime (The White Cat) whose spectacle of 'a Bull in a China Shop' afforded great entertainment. Marryat's Jacob Faithful (1834) is often cited as an early novel use. No real origin incident is documented: Quinion traced no actual rampaging bull, noting the only deliberate stunt was publicist Jim Moran leading a bull through a New York china shop in January 1940, and a 2007 Mythbusters test found bulls surprisingly agile. A much-repeated claim about an 1805 Copenhagen incident appears in none of the standard references and is unsupported. Most European languages prefer an elephant in the same image.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- like a bull in a china closet
- like an elephant in a china shop
Usage Examples
- In the archive's hushed reading room, Marta felt like a bull in a china shop, elbow-deep in brittle eighteenth-century letters.
- Send a diplomatic negotiator instead of Theo, because he approaches trade talks like a bull in a china shop.
- During my first week restoring antique clocks I was a bull in a china shop and chipped two porcelain faces.