Q: “Making the cut” is said to originate from golf, but it might equally be said to have its roots in early moviemaking. Which came first?
A: The expression “make the cut” didn’t originate in either golf or filmmaking. When it first appeared in print, the expression referred to people who didn’t “make the cut” for Christmas bonuses.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the usage as “to succeed in being included in, or admitted to, something; to be good enough for something.” The earliest OED example compares holiday bonuses to profit sharing:
“It wasn’t really profit sharing, I realized, because it didn’t include the publisher’s telephone operator and my own cook. In short, the common man, as usual, didn’t make the cut” (from “Control,” an essay by E. B. White in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1943).
The golf usage appeared a dozen years later. The OED defines it as “to qualify for the last two rounds of a four-round golf tournament, by equaling or bettering the required score.” The first citation is from a northern California newspaper:
“One local professional did manage to better the 36-hole total of 148 which was necessary to make the cut and qualify for Sunday’s final round over the Pebble Beach course” (Oakland Tribune, Jan. 16, 1955).
The OED says a much earlier use of “cut” in golf referred to “spin imparted on the ball which makes it curve in flight towards the right (or for a left-handed player, the left), esp. to a moderate and controlled degree.” It adds that such spin typically “results in the ball stopping quickly rather than rolling on, esp. in shots to the green.”
In the dictionary’s first citation, the ball stops suddenly on the green: “Almost every professional gets his ball to stop comparatively dead … by means of putting cut upon it” (from Golf, 1890, by Horace G. Hutchinson). The book was part of The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes, founded by Henry Somerset, 8th Duke of Beaufort. Badminton was his main country house and the source of the name for the racket sport played with a shuttlecock.
The OED doesn’t have any filmmaking examples of “make the cut,” though we’ve seen it used literally for making “cuts,” or transitions, in a film. A recent example appears in the title of a book on film editing: Make the Cut: A Guide to Becoming a Successful Assistant Editor in Film and TV (2017), by Lori Coleman and Diana Friedberg.
The noun “cut” has been used since the early 20th century to mean “an immediate transition from one shot or scene to the next”—at first in filmmaking and later in television, video games, social media, etc., according to the OED. The dictionary’s first example is from an early guide to film production:
“There is a cut to some other scene and we come back to Smith standing over Brown with a smoking revolver in his hand.” From The Technique of the Photoplay (2nd ed., 1913), by Epes Winthrop Sargent.
The verb “cut” soon came to be used as a command by a director to stop filming. The earliest Oxford citation is from a California newspaper: “Director Smith yelled ‘cut’ ” (Santa Cruz Evening News, Dec. 22, 1915).
As for its early etymology, “cut” is “of uncertain origin,” the OED says, though it was perhaps inherited from prehistoric Germanic or early Scandinavian.
When it first appeared in the late 12th century, “cut” meant “to separate or remove (something) from a main body or larger whole with a knife, axe, or other sharp-edged implement; to lop off.”
The dictionary’s earliest example is from Layamon’s Brut, a legendary chronicle of Britain composed sometime before 1200. “He cutte his owe þeh … þar-of he makede breade” (“He cut his own thigh … thereof he maketh roast meat”).
In the tale, King Cadwallon and his men are stranded on Guernsey after a shipwreck. The King is starving and says he has a craving for venison. With no deer on the island, his nephew Brian cuts off and roasts a piece of his own flesh. The citation combines passages from two surviving Layamon manuscripts, Caligula (late 13th century) and Otho (early 14th century).
The dictionary also cites a manuscript, written in legal Latin around the same time, in which the verb appears as part of the compound “cutpurse,” a nickname for someone who steals purses by cutting the straps holding them to belts or waistbands:
“Willelmus Cuttepurs qui occidit Willelmum mercatorem de Corbrigg’ postea captus fuit et coram Justic’ ad gaol’ deliberand’ assign’ suspensus fuit. nulla habuit catall’ ” (“William Cutpurse, who killed William the merchant of Corbridge, was later captured and, before the Justices assigned to deliver him to jail, was hanged. He had no chattels”). From a 1292 entry in the Eyre Roll Cumberland (records of traveling courts).
We’ll end with a comment from a former filmmaker about a 2022 post in which we discuss the expression “cut to the chase“:
As someone who used to inhabit cutting rooms, I think there’s another little element to this one. Why ‘cut’? That’s because in the earlier days of filmmaking, in order to edit a film you literally ‘cut’ the piece you wanted out of the main roll with scissors, and then glued those selected scenes together.
Later, ‘splicers’ turned up―clever little guillotine devices that made far more accurate and consistent cuts to be made, and joins to be made with clear specialist tape to create the ‘cutting copy,’ the first edited version of the film.
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