“COAT-TRAILING”. My father used to tell us every St. Patrick’s Day about our ancestor who kept a long coat which reached the ground and which he wore only on St. Patrick’s Day. He would walk the streets of Chicago until somebody, in my father’s words, “stepped on the tail of me coat. And then he’d start a fight.”
On the last page of the TLS for May 3, J.C. answers a letter from an American, who says: “For the second time in two weeks I have encountered ‘coat-trailing’ in the TLS. Is this a Britishism? What does it mean?” One of those previous TLS usages referred to some one with a grievance who had a “coat-trailing manner”. J.C. looks the word up in Chambers and finds: “trail one’s coat (tails) (orig. Irish) to be aggressive, pick a quarrel” J.C. concludes: “Not a Britishism, but an Irishism.”