Monkey on your back

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Meaning

A persistent burden, compulsion, or problem that is difficult to escape; historically, especially a drug addiction. Informal. In addiction contexts it is historically significant but can reduce a health condition to a colourful label; use person-centred language when describing a real individual. Monkey is also a racial slur when directed at a person, though that is not the meaning of this idiom. Regional use: The addiction sense developed in American slang; the broader burden image is widespread.

Origin

Images of a monkey clinging to someone's back were used for ill temper and other burdens before the phrase acquired its specific drug sense, but the earliest figurative development is not completely settled. Alfred R. Lindesmith's 1938 glossary of underworld drug language records monkey for a habit in the example I have a monkey on my back, especially during withdrawal. Nelson Algren's 1949 novel The Man with the Golden Arm then helped bring that drug-culture use to a wider audience. The broader burden sense remains current; the phrase was not created by a 1938 New Yorker article or by Prohibition.

Research Sources

  1. monkey Merriam-Webster
  2. monkey The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
  3. Argot of the Underworld Drug Addict Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Northwestern University Scholarly Commons
  4. Nelson Algren, Nathan Kantrowitz, and David Maurer discuss language and characteristics of the criminal underworld Studs Terkel Radio Archive, WFMT and Chicago History Museum

Variants

  • A monkey on one's back
  • Have a monkey on your back

Usage Examples

  • That unpaid judgment remained a monkey on the company's back for years.
  • The novel follows a veteran trying to get the monkey of opioid addiction off his back.
  • Once the team won the final, it finally got the monkey of repeated defeat off its back.

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