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Reader question: Please explain this sentence – Be ambitious, but don’t wear it on your sleeve. My comments: To paraphrase: Be ambitious, but don’t show it (your ambition) all the time. People sometimes wear a pin on their sleeve to show them off. It might be a pin bearing the logo of, say, your favorite soccer team, demonstrating your support for that particular club. People may wear such a pin on the chest of their coat, too but that is not an idiom. “Wearing it on the sleeve” is, and it is a variation from the idiom “wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve”, which “may derive from the custom at middle ages jousting matches”, according to Phrase.org. “Knights are said to have worn the colours of the lady they were supporting, in cloths or ribbons tied to their arms.” William Shakespeare, though, is credited with using the term for the first time, in Othello, 1604. Again, from Phrase.org: In the play, the treacherous Iago’s plan was to feign openness and vulnerability in order to appear faithful: Iago: It is sure as you are Roderigo, Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago: In following him, I follow but myself; Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, But seeming so, for my peculiar end: For when my outward action doth demonstrate The native act and figure of my heart | 
