Meaning:
a stimulus
Background:
Most people can remember their first injection.
This expression derives from the invigorating effect of injecting drugs. A
shot is of course US slang for an injection, either of a narcotic or
medicinal drug. That term has been in use since around the beginning of the
20th century; for example, this piece from the San Francisco Chronicle
Supplement, October 1904:
"I varied hardly a minute each day in the time of taking my injection. My
first shot was when I awoke in the morning."
`A shot in the arm' came soon afterwards and the first mention of a
figurative use of it in print that I can find is from the Maine newspaper The
Lewiston Evening Journal, January 1916:
The vets can give politics a shot in the arm and the political leaders
realize it.
- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]
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[I don't know any user personally but that might be because they hide it well
and I'm an uncultured migrant. I have heard, however, from Joe Rogan that it was
common in the cut-throat corporate world.]
How apt it is that the example should come from an SF paper! Last month,
marching up on the bustling Mission street and just before the SF Chronicle
building, I looked to my left into a quiet eerie alley, and froze at the scene:
four guys looking their 30s and 40s and in dark garbs, one sitting and the
others standing, all as if looking at the ground, and each with his head hanging as if by a noose. Motionless in
the clutch of their invisible gallows, they didn't seem just having taken a shot
in the arm, but one could never be sure as there was the practice of co-use.
I don't know why I fuss about the details. Charlie Munger used to tell the story
of a rustic who kept asking the priest about the spot where he was going to die.
``Once I know, I would never go there,'' he explained.
