Q: Where or when did the phrase “cutting corners” show up?
A: When the usage first appeared in writing in the early 19th century, it had to do with riders and drivers who made their horses take corners and bends in the road too sharply. And as far as we know, it was first used in the United States.
The earliest example we’ve found is in a letter to the editor printed in a Baltimore monthly, the American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, August 1831. Here the correspondent, signing himself “Tandem” (a carriage term), brags about the excellence of Americans in “riding and driving”:
“We have young gentlemen in Baltimore, of taste and fortune, who can handle the ribbands [reins] as well, and cut a corner as close, as any whip [coachman] in old England.”
However, we’ve also found the notion of cutting a corner used in boating (1840s) and in fox hunting (1850s). Here’s a boating example:
“Our present accident was in consequence of the boatmen endeavouring to cut a corner off, and to get before one of the other boats, which had started first.” From Five Years in the East, Vol. II (London, 1847), by R. N. Hutton, the pseudonym of Charles Henry Newmarch.
And this fox-hunting example refers to riders who cut away from the hounds and ride toward where a fox appears to be heading instead of staying with the pack following the fox’s meandering trail. The passage includes both “cutting corners” and “cross riding” (crossing the path of another rider):
“About a hundred and fifty horsemen were at once scattered over the downs, riding at the top of their speed, in almost all directions; some following the hounds, but a greater number, not liking the undulating nature of the ground, cutting corners, and hustling each other by cross riding.” From Letters on the Management of Hounds (1852), by William Horlock Knightley.
In the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation, which is from later in the 1850s, to “cut corners” means “to pass round (a corner) as close to the inside of the bend as possible.” The dictionary says it usually implies careless or dangerous driving, as in this passage:
“The groom sent down for the carriage gets drunk, drives full gallop up the Pass, and, cutting a corner rather too fine, goes over the precipice.” From a review of Samuel White Baker’s book Eight Years’ Wanderings in Ceylon (1855), published in the New Quarterly Review in 1856.
The OED says “to cut corners and variants” consequently came to mean “to pursue a course of action that saves time or makes things easy, but is hazardous or unorthodox.”
Oxford’s earliest citation for this sense is from a newspaper in Yorkshire, England: “The art of ‘cutting the corners,’ and other less legitimate tricks” (Huddersfield Examiner, July 25, 1868).
The dictionary says the expression now usually means “to do something in a perfunctory or inattentive way (often omitting a step or component or substituting something inferior), typically so as to reduce the expense associated with the activity. Sometimes also: to act illegally or untruthfully.”
In the latest OED citation, corners are cut to reduce prices: “To compete, some also promise more than they can deliver while others cut corners to offer low prices” (from The Straits Times, an English language newspaper in Singapore, Aug. 23, 2013).
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