To have skin in the game is to be incurring risk, monetary or otherwise – in the outcome of an effort. The phrase was recently popularized by investor Warren Buffet, but seems to be older.

The late columnist William Safire sought the origin of the phrase and didn’t resolve the issue. Some trace the phrase to a related element of Shakespeare’s play The Mercahnt of Venice where a character offers a pound of his own flesh as collateral.

The phrase makes me think of another saying, that when you eat your ham -and-egg breakfast, realize that the hen was involved but the pig was committed. Wonder where the came from?