Etymology of ‘chock-a-block’ [pt. 2]

[Part 1]

According to the official story, the English idiom ‘chock-a-block’ comes from nautical mechanics. The Oxford English Dictionary gives: ‘Nautical. Of hoisting tackle: having the two blocks drawn together as close as possible’; and also: ‘Colloquial. Pressed or crowded close together; full to capacity, completely full; crammed with’.

Supposedly the phrase was first used to refer to the operation of a block and tackle, where the movable pulley block comes into contact with the fixed block, and the load cannot be further raised: the two blocks being in contact are said to be ‘chock-a-block’. Subsequently, so it is said, the term was transferred metaphorically to mean any condition in which many objects are so closely packed as to be unable to move.

If the colloquial use rests on the metaphor of two pulley blocks being in contact, why is the phrase ‘chock-a-block’ and not ‘block-a-block’? Of course someone might reply that this is just how things turned out, and perhaps that’s true. But to conclude that something has no explanation ought to be a last resort, after all other explanations have been rejected, and not the first point of call. And so the ‘chock’ is a puzzle. Could it be a wooden wedge of the sort used to immobilise an object that is liable to roll? But this makes no mechanical sense in the case of pulleys, and anyway the original image was supposed to be of two blocks pressed together, not a block and a wedge.

In fact ‘chock’ has its own independent life outside ‘chock-a-block’, in the colloquialism ‘chock-full’, for which the OED gives: ‘Full to capacity; crammed or packed full (of or occasionally with something)’; and for ‘chock’ itself: ‘As closely or tightly as possible; as far as possible; so as to allow no gap; directly’. If this meaning for ‘chock’ is right, then ‘chock-a-block’ would mean ‘as closely or tightly as possible to the block’. A perfect solution; except that it begs the very question which is at issue: How it is that ‘chock’ comes to mean ‘as closely or tightly as possible’?

Giving many examples in various spellings, and remarking that the term’s ‘early history is obscure’, the OED tentatively suggests that ‘chock’ derives from ‘choke’, as in being throttled, so that ‘chock-full’ carries the inner meaning of ‘full to the point of choking’. The implication is that the metaphor of throttling came to be used for two pulley blocks touching. This is not impossible; in the realm of folk worldplay, little is; yet the idea of a shift from ‘choking’ to ‘tightly packed’ is not very convincing. As a friend pointed out to me, in choking, or throttling, it is the space in which the objects are contained that is being constricted, whereas in saying something is ‘chock-full’ the space is imagined as constant but the objects are packed tightly in. This is exactly the sort of difference that folk wordplay would not overlook.

Explaining the meaning of ‘chock-a-block’ in terms of another idiom, ‘chock-full’, is an effort to explain a mystery with another mystery. Someone, long ago, has begun with the assumption that ‘chock-a-block’ has the core meaning of ‘as close as possible to the block’, and has then subtracted from that explication the word ‘block’, assigning everything left over as the meaning of ‘chock’. That is, the meaning of ‘chock-a-block’ depends on the meaning of ‘chock’, and the meaning of ‘chock’ depends on the meaning of ‘chock-a-block’. To escape this circle, a meaning for ‘chock’ in terms of ‘choking’ has been confabulated.

Yet if we suppose that ‘chock-a-block’ did not originally mean ‘as close as possible to the block’, but rather ‘very crowded’—that is, what is supposed to be the metaphorical use is actually the core meaning, and the use in nautical mechanics is just an extension of this—then ‘chock’ only needs to mean ‘very’. Indeed, this was implicit in the OED’s very first meaning given for ‘chock-full’, ‘full to capacity’; or, in other words, ‘very full’, and it corresponds exactly to the Turkish, çok [very] kalabalık [crowded].

That ‘chock-a-block’ is a borrowing from Turkish is therefore not just obvious from both meaning and pronunciation, but it is the only explanation on offer. The official etymology of ‘chock-a-block’ dissolves on inspection into a welter of disconnected images; the appearance of explanation is a mirage.