Meaning
To get the worst share of a deal or situation; to be treated unfairly or come off worse while others benefit. Mainly American and Australian usage - Cambridge marks it 'US and Australian English' - and it typically appears as 'get' or 'draw' the short end of the stick. Not to be confused with the British 'get the wrong end of the stick', which means to misunderstand something. Informal; commiserating or indignant in tone, and usually paired with 'get', 'draw' or 'be given'. Regional use: American English (also Australian); the wrong-end variant is British.
Origin
The '... end of the stick' family is medieval in origin: Nicolas Udall's Apophthegmes of Erasmus (1542) already has the figurative 'the wurse ende of the staffe', and John Heywood's 1562 proverb collection keeps the staff. The British 'wrong end of the stick' acquired its misunderstanding sense only in the mid-19th century (The New Monthly Magazine, 1850). The American 'short end' form grew out of coarser variants: 'the crappy end of the stick', with a still coarser spelling, is recorded in The Swell's Night Guide (1846), and Green's Dictionary of Slang traces 'raw end' (Dos Passos, 1921), 'dirty end' (1925) and 'shitty end' (Mailer, 1948), with the plain 'short' form surfacing later - 'getting the short end' in On the Waterfront (1955) and the full wording in Dorothy Hewett's Bobbin Up (1959). Green's labels the whole family originally US. One theory holds that 'short' is simply a euphemism for the coarser word; The Phrase Finder notes the jury is still out, since literal 'short end of a stick' uses also exist.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- draw the short end of the stick
- get the dirty end of the stick
- get the shitty end of the stick
- get the short end
- get the wrong end of the stick
Usage Examples
- Whenever layoffs come around, it's the night-shift crew that gets the short end of the stick.
- As the youngest of four siblings, he had drawn the short end of the stick at every family holiday for years.
- Taxpayers keep getting the short end of the stick while the contractors walk away with the profits.