To associate unexpectedly closely with. This term originated in Britain as rub shoulders with, which is still the more common locution there. Thackeray used it in his Book of Snobs (1848): “She had rubbed shoulders with the great.” Elbows are preferred in America, as in Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906): “Young white girls from the country rubbing elbows with big buck Negroes with daggers in their boots.”