Someone who has been shafted has been treated very unfairly: cheated, betrayed, exploited or done out of something that was rightfully theirs. Workers are shafted by their employers, customers by the small print, and football fans will swear their team was shafted by the referee. The word is informal, with a flash of aggression about it, but it is no longer felt to be properly obscene and British newspapers use it freely. It belongs to a small family of related expressions: to shaft someone, to get the shaft and to give someone the shaft.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘shafted’?
“Shaft” is an old English word for anything long, straight and rigid: the body of an arrow or spear, later the handle of a tool, the pole of a cart, the column of a mine. Two of its offshoots feed into the modern phrase. One is anatomical: Green’s Dictionary of Slang records “shaft” as slang for the penis from as early as 1611, when the poet John Davies of Hereford punned that “Many Archers do as good, and pricke with Shaftes as low.” The other is the arrow, which gave literary English its figurative “shafts” of wit, satire and ridicule, barbed words launched at a target.
The arrow sense supplies the first recorded glimpse of “the shaft” as something unpleasant heading your way. Green’s earliest citation is Jack Lait’s Beef, Iron and Wine (1916), a collection of Chicago newspaper sketches. A veteran reporter opens a request to the city editor with “I’ve been thinking”; the editor sneers that this alone would make a front-page item, and the reporter presses on, in Lait’s words, “sidestepping the shaft”. The shaft there is still a barbed remark to be dodged rather than an act of betrayal, but the picture of victim and missile is in place.
The modern sense, to cheat or betray someone, is mid-twentieth-century American. Green’s earliest example of the verb comes from Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled novel The Long Wait (1951): “She’s going to have more on her mind than trying to shaft you.” By the end of that decade it was thriving as student slang. A 1959 article on campus usage in the journal American Speech reported that when one student stole another’s date, “the loser gets the shaft (sometimes with barbs), the purple shaft, or the maroon harpoon”.
By then the image behind the phrase had shifted from archery to something cruder. Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner’s Dictionary of American Slang (1960) spelled it out: “the image is the taboo one of the final insult, having someone insert something, as a barbed shaft, up one’s rectum.” To be shafted, in plain terms, is to be violated, the arrow and the older anatomical slang collapsing into a single indignity. The wording keeps the obscenity at one remove, which is perhaps why it travelled so easily into everyday speech.
The phrase stayed largely American for a generation before spreading through the English-speaking world. Green’s citations show it in Australian use by 1985, when Barry Humphries wrote of “a type of ex-pat Australian journo who gets off on shafting his old mates back home”, and in the British press by the end of the 1990s; the Observer in 1999, for instance, had “The same man shafted him over a policy”. In Britain today it is wholly naturalised, the standard informal word for finding yourself on the wrong end of a stitch-up. When the stitch-up involves money, English offers the indignant upgrade of daylight robbery.