To get the short end of the stick is to be left with the worse share of a deal, or treated unfairly. The phrase is American in origin; the English ‘worse end of the staff’ was in print by 1564. The British ‘wrong end of the stick’ is a different idiom, and means having misunderstood something.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘The short end of the stick’?
The expression ‘the … end of the stick’ comes in many forms. The majority of these refer to getting the worse or, occasionally, the better part of a bargain. They inserted adjectives which indicate the bad outcome are ‘short’, ‘crappy’ or ‘blunt’ (or their synonyms or antonyms). There is also the phrase ‘getting the wrong end of the stick’, which has a different meaning, that is, ‘having the facts wrong’ or simply ‘being mistaken’.
Taking the occurrence of these in search engines as a guide, the four forms rank in popularity of current usage like this:
1. Short/shorter/long.
2. Wrong/rough/right.
3. Shit/shitty/dirty/crap/crappy.
4. Butt/blunt/pointy/pointed/thick.
Both meanings of the phrase, that is, bad bargain or wrong facts, originated with a negative connotation. The ‘long end of the stick’ and ‘right end of the stick’ were coined later as simple opposites of their respective original form.
The ‘worst end of a bargain’ form of the expression is quite an old phrase and, in keeping with its medieval origins, originally referred to a staff, rather than a stick; for example, the phrase occurs in Nicolas Udall’s Apophthegmes of Erasmus, 1542:
As often as thei see theim selfes to haue the wurse ende of the staffe in their cause.
Udall’s subject there is an argument rather than a bargain. The passage is about orators who fall back on shouting, and the literal 1877 reprint of the 1564 edition of the Apophthegmes of Erasmus describes them as men who ‘see theim selfes to haue the worse ende of the staffe in their cause’. The oldest form of the saying is therefore already figurative, and already about coming off worse.
John Heywood’s notable reference work of 1562 still has the staff, and it is the 1906 edition of it that glosses his line with the modern stick. The book is A Dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the Prouerbes in the Englishe tongue, 1562, and the gloss reads:
“The worst end of the staff”, we now say “wrong end of the stick”.
Those words are not Heywood’s. They are the glossary note of John S. Farmer, who edited A Dialogue of the Effectual Proverbs in the English Tongue for print in 1906. His glossary entry for ‘staff’ reads: ‘the worse end of the staff’ (58c), we now say ‘wrong end of the stick.’ Heywood’s own line, in the third chapter of the dialogue, is ‘Who had the worst end of the staff, (quoth I), now?’, and it says nothing about a stick. The staff is still a staff in 1562; the swap to ‘stick’ is Farmer’s, three and a half centuries later.
That gloss makes it eminently clear that ‘the wrong end of the stick’ was understood to mean the same as the old ‘worst end of the staff’. The meaning of that phrase didn’t change, that is, people didn’t start getting the wrong end of the stick in the sense of ‘being mistaken’, until the mid 19th century. The earliest use that I can find of the phrase in that context is in the British political magazine The New Monthly Magazine, 1850:
“I am so stupid - I am so apt to take things up in a wrong light. In fact, I am always getting hold of the wrong end of the stick.”
The two senses are still split by nationality. The Cambridge Dictionary marks ‘get the short end of the stick’ as US and Australian English and defines it as ‘to suffer the bad effects of a situation’; it marks ‘get the wrong end of the stick’ as UK informal and defines it as ‘to not understand a situation correctly’. Green’s Dictionary of Slang gives the first of those as originally US, ‘unfair treatment, deliberately engineered bad luck’. An American who gets the short end has been done down; a Briton who gets the wrong end has barked up the wrong tree.
‘The short end of the stick’ is by far the most commonly used form of the phrase. That is rather odd, in that the ends of sticks can be dirty or pointy, they can even be iridescent or hirsute, but it is difficult to see how they can be short. This has spawned the suggestion that ‘short’ is simply a euphemism for ‘shit’ - after all sticks can be shitty and that form of the phrase is also commonplace.
The date of ‘the shit end of the stick’ makes this theory at least plausible, in that the phrase was known in that form by the mid 19th century, as in this example from The Swell’s Night Guide, 1846:
Which of us had hold of the crappy (sh-ten) end of the stick?
I can find no examples of ‘the short end of the stick’ with the current figurative meaning that pre-date that example.
To take the case for the opposition to the ‘short’ equals ‘shit’ premise, it isn’t difficult to find examples in print of people grasping ‘the short end of the stick’ that are clearly intended to be literal, that is, a real stick was involved. What a short end of a stick is still unclear to me, but it seems that others, in the 19th century at least, knew what it meant. The jury is still out
The dated citations in Green’s Dictionary of Slang line up behind the euphemism reading rather than against it. The coarse and the merely unpleasant forms come first: ‘we gits the raw end of the stick’ in John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, 1921; ‘we get the dirty end of the stick’ in his Manhattan Transfer, 1925; and ‘you’re gonna get […] the shitty end of the stick’ in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, 1948. The plain ‘short’ form turns up later. Green’s earliest example of it is Budd Schulberg’s On the Waterfront, 1955, ‘You’ve got some other brothers, and they’re getting the short end’, and its earliest example of the full wording is Dorothy Hewett’s Bobbin Up, 1959: ‘The eldest always copped the short end of the stick.’
Hugh Rawson said it outright. His Dictionary of Invective, 1989, quoted in Green’s, glosses the shit or shitty end of the stick as ‘the worst end of any deal; bad treatment in general’, and adds that ‘the phrase is often prettied up as the dirty (or short) end of the stick’. That is a plain statement, from a lexicographer of invective, that ‘short’ is the polite substitution.
Green’s files the whole family under one heading, with the recorded variants listed as bullshit, crap, crappy, dirty, raw, shit and shitty end of the stick, plus ‘short end of the funnel’ and ‘shitten end of a brick’. ‘Brunt end of the stick’ is not among them, and looks like a crossing with ‘bear the brunt’.
None of that settles what a short end of a stick would physically be. The record does show that the sense was in place, in coarser wording, more than thirty years before ‘short’ arrived to carry it, and that the phrase sits with the other ways English has of saying someone has been shafted.