Meaning
Under someone's control or influence, especially through money: a person or body that is in someone's pocket does their bidding, often corruptly - a bought official, a captured regulator, a dependent politician. A separate, chiefly British extension, to live in each other's pockets, means to live in excessively close proximity or interdependence. Strongly derogatory in the control sense - Wiktionary labels the bribery sense derogatory. Usually framed as have someone in one's pocket or be in the pocket of. Keep distinct from out of pocket (at a financial loss), already current in the seventeenth century. Regional use: General English; live in each other's pockets chiefly British.
Origin
The metaphor is physical: what sits in your pocket you carry, contain and command. Etymonline records pocket itself from the mid-fourteenth-century pokete, a small bag, with the worn-on-person sense from the early fifteenth century. For the control sense, Christine Ammer's American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms gives [Mid-1800s], glossing it 'in one's power or possession, under one's influence' with the example 'The defense lawyer had the jury in his pocket' - verified on the Farlex page. The proximity sense is much older: Word Histories' survey finds the earliest known occurrence in Horace Walpole's letter of 2 February 1762 ('the company squeezed themselves into one another's pockets'), newspaper uses of 'in each other's pockets' from 1843, and the fixed form 'to live in each other's pockets' by 1891 in The Queen - antedating Ammer's mid-1900s dating for that form by decades, a disagreement the record bears.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- have someone in your pocket
- in the pocket of someone
- live in each other's pockets
Usage Examples
- Half the planning committee is in the developer's pocket, so the zoning vote is a foregone conclusion.
- Ever since the chairman settled the club's debts, the board has been in his pocket.
- Flatmates who work, eat and holiday together soon end up living in each other's pockets.