I was typing out the phrase wheeling and dealing and, as so often happens to me these days, stopped mid-keystroke, to wonder: How old is this phrase? And where did it come from?
You probably have your own theories, as I did mine. I figured it must come from the gambling world, and I was thinking it might be pretty old. Maybe even mid-19th century? (When was roulette invented? Whoops, mustn't get sidetracked. **)
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The Grammarist offers up the following:
Wheel and deal is an American phrase that means to pursue one’s interests zealously, usually in a scheming or unscrupulous manner. Wheel and deal usually applies to pursuits in the business or political world. The origin of the phrase wheel and deal is up for debate, but there are several interesting theories. The first theory attributes the origin to American gambling, the term wheel and deal supposedly describing someone’s ability to run a roulette wheel game or a card game. Another theory attributes the phrase wheel and deal to the automobile industry in the 1930s, when many car dealers proclaimed they were giving wheel deals, or competitive pricing on their inventories. After World War II, the phrase wheel and deal became common. Related terms are wheels and deals, wheeling and dealing, and the noun wheeler-dealer.
Ah-ha. There's the roulette wheel reference, but no date attached to it. The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms also mentions roulette, but doesn't support my 19th century suppositions:
wheel and deal. Operate or manipulate for one's own interest, especially in an aggressive or unscrupulous way. ... This term comes from gambling in the American West, where a wheeler-dealer was a heavy bettor on the roulette wheel and at cards. [Colloquial; c. 1940]My Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, pushes the term even closer to the here and now, saying wheeler-dealer dates from 1954.
Well. I'm glad I haven't used it in my fiction. I'll just have to be sure to keep any wheeling and dealing confined to the mid- to late-20th century.
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| Wheeling and dealing in abundance. La Roulette in the Casino, from Monte-Carlo, 2nd Serie (circa 1910) by Georges Goursat (1863–1934), known as Sem |
** But of course I had to look it up! According to Wikipedia, roulette has been around since the 1700s, and may have been invented by mathematician Blaise Pascal:
The first form of roulette was devised in 18th century France. Many historians believe Blaise Pascal introduced a primitive form of roulette in the 17th century in his search for a perpetual motion machine. The roulette mechanism is a hybrid of a gaming wheel invented in 1720 and the Italian game Biribi. The game has been played in its present form since as early as 1796 in Paris. An early description of the roulette game in its current form is found in a French novel La Roulette, ou le Jour by Jaques Lablee, which describes a roulette wheel in the Palais Royal in Paris in 1796.
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