Meaning & Analysis
To hand someone a ‘bone’—a tough, gnaw-worthy object—i.e., to present them with a difficult matter, grievance, or puzzle that will occupy their attention and effort.
Insights
Provoked grievance
You raise an issue that another must ‘pick over’—a complaint to answer, an accusation to address—forcing confrontation with something unpleasant or ‘hard to swallow.’
Cognitive burden
You set a knotty problem or riddle that consumes mental energy, giving the person ‘wherewithal to gnaw’ until they’ve worked it through.
Trial by difficulty
A deliberate test is posed (‘a bone worth the picking’), putting someone ‘to his trumps’ so that their skill, patience, or wit is proved by resistance.
Tactical distraction
By supplying a chewy side-issue, you keep a critic or rival busy, diverting them from your main designs while they fret over the bone.
Unwelcome truth
The ‘bone’ can be blunt information that will ‘stick in the throat’: necessary but discomforting facts that demand digestion before progress.
From kennel to council
The dog-with-bone image migrates into rhetoric: a stubborn matter is tossed into debate so speakers must worry it, bite by bite, until substance is extracted or tempers are spent.
Early modern glosses
Contemporaries define it explicitly as puzzling or putting a man to his best play, and even warn it may ‘stick in your ha’se [throat],’ underscoring both difficulty and indigestion as core senses.
Proverbial family
Kin maxims—‘a bone of contention,’ ‘to cast a bone between them,’ and ‘a crow to pluck with you’—map a spectrum from absorbing difficulty to engineered strife and open quarrel.
Psychology of fixation
Hard problems create attentional capture: like a dog worrying a bone, people loop on unresolved tasks, which makes ‘giving a bone’ an effective way to direct or derail focus.
Ambivalent ethics
The move can be pedagogical—setting a worthy challenge—or manipulative—busywork or bait. The proverb names a tool whose virtue depends on the giver’s intent.
Semantic contrast
Don’t confuse it with ‘throw someone a bone’ (a small favor). Here the bone is not a treat but a task: tough, resistant, and meant to be worked.
Rhetorical Devices
Metaphor
A gnawed bone embodies difficulty, turning abstract puzzles and disputes into a tactile, mouth-centered image.
Zoomorphism
The addressee is cast as a dog with a bone, humorously lowering stakes while highlighting persistence and irritability.
Alliteration
The b- and p-sounds in ‘bone’ and ‘pick’ give the idiom percussive snap, helping it lodge in memory.
Euphemism
A potentially aggressive act—provocation or accusation—is softened as ‘giving a bone,’ masking conflict in homely imagery.
Synecdoche
The ‘bone’ stands for the whole vexing matter—facts, tasks, grievances—compressed into one chewable prop.
Transcription
Quotations
Only therefore will I add this, which may be a bone for you to pick on.
Gnawe on this bone, all is not golde that glistereth.
I haue giuen him a bone to gnawe, or I haue caste him in doubte.
I cast the[e] a bone to bite on.
You giue me a hard bone to gnaw vpon, with these cardes.
Has given me A bone to tire on, with a pestilence.
'Tis a bone worth the picking.
To give one wherewithall to gnaw, viz. to puzzel a man, to put one to his trumps, to give one a bone to pick, that will hold tack, or a Crow to pluck.
There's a bone for you to pick.
But here's a Bone for ye to Pick.
I'll give you a Bone to pick, that will stick in your Ha'se [throat].
[As in 1670 Ray].
Cross References
Annotations
- I'll tell you of something, that you will not easily digest.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.