Chicago
41.8819°N -87.6278°W · Q1297
4 English words in this atlas trace back to Chicago. It sits in United States.
A 1950s student exchange put Chicago economics into a Chilean junta's cabinet.
From the mid-1950s a US-funded program sent students from Santiago's Catholic University to study under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, and the nickname followed them home. After the 1973 coup they ran much of the economy, and the label has since been reused for free-market technocrats elsewhere.
Raymond Chandler put it in print in 1939, and it has been gangster shorthand ever since.
Green's Dictionary of Slang traces the image to sealing a corpse in cement before dumping it, which is also why the phrase doubles for cement shoes. Its first recorded use is in Chandler's The Big Sleep in 1939. It belongs to the same Prohibition-era Chicago set as Chicago typewriter and Chicago lightning.
The army would not buy it, so the name came from the people who did.
The Thompson reached the market just after the First World War and found few military buyers, but Prohibition-era Chicago gangs bought it freely and gave it a family of nicknames. The rattle of its fire suggested a typing pool. Chicago lightning meant gunfire and a Chicago overcoat meant a coffin.
A nickname built on a nickname: the White Sox were already a headline writer's abbreviation.
The Chicago club was the White Stockings until newspapers cut the name down, and it adopted the shortened White Sox by 1904. Chisox compresses it a second time by prefixing the city. Its twin, Bosox, does the same job for Boston, and the two exist mainly to keep the two Sox teams apart in print.