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The English language expression silver spoon is synonymous with wealth, especially inherited wealth; someone born into a wealthy family is said to have "been born with a silver spoon in his mouth". As an adjective, "silver spoon" describes someone who has a prosperous background or is of a well-to-do family environment, often with the connotation that the person does not appreciate or deserve his or her advantage, its having been inherited rather than earned.
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Historical uses
Before the place setting became popular around 1700, people brought their own spoons to the table, carrying them in the same way that people today carry wallet and keys. In pre-modern times, ownership of a silver spoon was an indication of social class, denoting membership in the land-owning classes. In the Middle Ages, when farmers and craftsmen worked long hours and frequently got dirt under their fingernails, it was important to not be mistaken for a serf or escaped slave. Under these circumstances, a silver spoon served the functional equivalent of passport, driving licence, and credit card. Since most members of the land-owning classes were smallhold farmers and craftsmen, the silver spoon was primarily a lower-middle-class cultural marker.
Silver spoons, because of their weight and number, were often among the most valuable tangible assets of a middle-class household, and therefore, a traditional target for burglars. For example, in the feature film Far and Away (1992), the character Shannon plans to pay for her emigration from Ireland to the United States with spoons she stole from her wealthy landowner parents.
Beyond their value and aesthetics, silver utensils self-sanitize: silver has antimicrobial properties, due to the oligodynamic effect.
Silver spoons have also been used to detect poison, particularly in the Korean Joseon Dynasty: due to its reactivity, silver tarnishes on contact with sulfur, thus detecting the presence of arsenic sulfides and warning of arsenic poisoning.
Variants
There are similar expressions in other languages. For example, in Portuguese and Spanish, an expression translated as "born in a gold cradle" is fiduciary to the English, "born with a silver spoon."
The term "gold spoon" is much less commonly used, but finds occasional use, such as the 1840 American Gold Spoon Oration criticizing then-president Martin Van Buren for his supposedly luxurious lifestyle. In some languages, like Swedish and Finnish, the common expression is gold spoon rather than silver spoon, although both can be used.
"Silver fork novels" are described by English professor Paola Brunetti to her husband Guido, in Donna Leon's fourth Commissario Guido Brunetti novel Death and Judgment aka A Venetian Reckoning (1995), chapter 22, as "books written in the eighteenth century, when all that money pored into England from the colonies, and the fat wives of Yorkshire weavers had to be taught which fork to use."
In Australia the expression "silvertail" is also used, with nearly identical meaning. It has been used in cultural or political situations to describe someone as aristocratic or out of touch with the common people.