What it means
You say give me gip when something keeps nagging, hurting, or making life awkward, usually your body but sometimes a machine or situation too. A dodgy knee, a sore back, even a car can be giving you gip. It’s an older British phrase, and plenty of people avoid the spelling gyp now because of its link to an ethnic slur, often swapping in giving me grief instead.
Usage examples
"How’s your knee? Still giving me gip, mate. Tried to leg it for the bus and it protested like an old door hinge, proper creaky."
"My lower back has been giving me gip ever since I tried to shift the bookcase by myself last Saturday afternoon, and the ibuprofen has done about as much as a polite request to the wallpaper."
"The old Ford has been giving me gip for three weeks, won’t start in the rain, won’t start in the cold, and now it makes a noise like an angry kettle when I take the dog to the woods."
"This tooth’s been giving me gip all week, proper throbbing away like it’s got a vendetta."
"The boiler chose the coldest morning of the year to start giving me gip, the absolute diva."
Where it comes from
Give me gip began life in the industrial north of England in the late eighteen-hundreds, with gip or gyp meaning a sharp pain or relentless trouble. Linguists disagree about the deepest root: some trace it to the gee-up shout used to drive horses, others to Romani influence through gypsy, others still to gippy meaning short for Egyptian in army slang. The slur connection is what has pushed many speakers to swap the phrase for giving me grief over the past two decades.
