In an editorial about the world’s response to the arrest of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, we said: “The EU, which now contains many former member states of the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc, has considerable skin in this game.” Owen Jones wrote to ask if this phrase is an Americanism. I suppose it is, in that it was popularised by Warren Buffett, the US investor, but it is such a recent coinage, recorded from about 1981, that it ought perhaps to be called a globalism.
No one seems to know quite where it came from. There are suggestions on the internet that skin could be slang for a horse, from racing, or that it refers to the self, the person.
Yet everyone seems to know what it means, namely to have a stake in the outcome of something. The most likely origin, I think, is that the skin means the prize; it is a term, as Mr Jones pointed out, used in golf to mean a pot of money to which players contribute and which is taken by the winner of each hole. It is an eccentric phrase and I don’t see the point of it, but I can’t see the harm.
