The story
In England, from around the 1500s, it became a custom for godparents to give a new baby a silver spoon. Owning silver was a sign of comfort, and not every family could manage such a gift.
A child who started life with a silver spoon was a child with well-off people around them. The saying usually puts the spoon right in the baby’s mouth, as if the child were born already eating from it.
The phrase was well known by the early 1700s. In 1712, Peter Motteux’s English translation of Don Quixote has Sancho Panza remind his wife that “every Man was not born with a Silver Spoon in his Mouth.” In 1721 a collection of Scottish proverbs listed nearly the same line.
Today it is rarely a compliment. It suggests someone had an easy start, and it is usually said by people who did not.
