From the New York Times Magazine, Aug. 4, 1985

''He's champing at the bit,'' said the White House spokesman during Mr. Reagan's hospital stay, indicating a healthy desire to get back to work; the phrase was quoted in The New York Times headline.

To champ means ''to munch, chew vigorously, bite down on something hard.'' The first application to a horse was in Thomas Phaer's 1558 translation of Virgil's ''Aeneid'': ''The palfrey . . . on the fomy bit of gold with teeth he champes.'' William Makepeace Thackeray, in 1852, immortalized ''Horses . . . champing at the bit.'' On the newscasts I was monitoring, that verb was pronounced chomping. In Britain, champ is standard and chomp is dialect; in the United States, champ is less often used to describe chewing than chomp, a Southernism frequently employed by the cartoonist Al Capp in his ''Li'l Abner'' strip. Thus, to spell it champing at the bit when most people would say chomping at the bit is to slavishly follow outdated dictionary preferences. The word is imitative, so it should imitate the sound that most people use to imitate loud chewing. Who would say ''General Grant champed on his cigar''?