(to) cut off your nose to spite your face To perform a self-defeating action. The expression may have originated in 1593 when King Henry IV of France seemed willing to sacrifice the city of Paris because of its citizens’ objections to his being monarch. One of his own men had the temerity to suggest that destroying Paris would be like cutting off his nose to spite his face. The phrase seems not to have taken hold in English until the mid-19th century.
(to) cut the mustard To succeed, to have the ability to do what’s necessary. One might say of someone ‘He didn’t cut much mustard.’ An American phrase dating from about 1900 when ‘mustard’ was slang for the ‘real thing’, ‘the best’ or the ‘genuine article’, and this may have contributed to the coinage. Alternatively, as mustard is a notoriously difficult crop to harvest, if you can’t cut it or hack it, then your vigour has disappeared and you are not up to scratch. Another theory is that the phrase is a mishearing of ‘cut the muster’, a military phrase meaning ‘well-turned-out’ both in appearance and timeliness. Whether there is any connection with the phrase KEEN AS MUSTARD is unclear. ‘Boss Finley’s too old to cut the mustard [i.e. perform sexually]’ – Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth (1959); ‘So few now bother to attend the Church of England that the ancient title Defender of the Faith – so important in its historical context – cuts little mustard’ – Polly Toynbee in Radio Times (22 July 1995).
(the) cutting edge That which is considered to be at the centre of attention or activity. The term is derived from the ancient notion that the sharp edge is the most important part of a blade, but the earliest example in the OED2 is only from 1966. Before it had been watered down by overuse, Dr Jacob Bronowski used the phrase in his TV series The Ascent of Man (1973): ‘The hand is more important than the eye…The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.’ A cliché by the late 1980s. In its original sense (of the business end of a blade), it occurs in the first line of John Masefield’s poem ‘To-morrow’ (1921). ‘Yet something has changed. Sex – except perhaps, and necessarily, for lesbians and gay men – is no longer at the cutting edge of politics, especially for women’ – The Guardian (14 March 1989); ‘His apologists would no doubt claim Nyman as a cuttingedge post-modernist, knowingly subverting the traditional genre and exposing the hollowness within; but what is the difference?’ – Financial Times (19 April 1995); ‘Barbara Kohnstamm believes we may be at the cutting edge of mother-son relationships’ – The Irish Times (26 April 1995).
cutting room See FACE ON.
(to) cut to the chase Meaning ‘to cut out the unnecessary chit-chat and get to the point’, the phrase obviously comes from film editing but the transferred use became popular only in the 1990s. There is a literal first use of the phrase in a film editing context in Joseph Patrick McEvoy, Hollywood Girl (1929): ‘Jannings escapes…Cut to chase.’ But even the more recent allusive uses are either in films or bound up with them. The phrase occurs in William Goldman’s Hollywood novel Tinsel (1979); ‘Darryl Zanuck used to tell film makers, “If you’re in trouble, cut to the chase”’ – The New York Times (6 November 1981); in the film The Presidio (US 1988), Donna Caldwell (Meg Ryan) says seductively to a cop: ‘We can sit here and talk for a couple of hours and wonder what it would be like to be alone together…or…we could just cut to the chase’; from Madonna’s diary of filming Evita, published in Vanity Fair (November 1996): meeting President Menem to get permission for her to sing ‘Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina’ on the actual balcony of the Casa Rosada, Madonna evidently overturned diplomatic niceties and said, ‘Let’s cut to the chase here. Do we have the balcony or don’t we?’ Menem replied: ‘You can have the balcony.’
dabra, dabra! See EYEYDON.
daddy See DON’T GO DOWN.
Dad’s Army The long-running BBC TV comedy series Dad’s Army (1968–77) established in general use a nickname for the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), formed in Britain at the outbreak of the Second World War and soon renamed the Home Guard. ‘Dad’s Army’ was a posthumous nickname given by those looking back on the exploits of this civilian force (though its members were uniformed and attached to army units). Many of the members were elderly men.
daft See EE, ISN’T IT.
daft as a brush Meaning ‘stupid’, this expression was adapted from the northern English soft as a brush by the comedian Ken Platt (1921–98), who said in 1979: ‘I started saying daft as a brush when I was doing shows in the Army in the 1940s. People used to write and tell me I’d got it wrong!’ (Partridge/Slang suggests that ‘daft…’ was in use before this, however, and Paul Beale reports the full version – ‘daft as a brush without bristles’ – from the 1920s.)
daggers See AT DAGGERS.
Damascus See ROAD TO DAMASCUS.
damn See AS NEAR AS.
(a) damn close-run thing A narrow victory. What the 1st Duke of Wellington actually told the memoirist Thomas Creevey about the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo was: ‘It has been a damned serious business. Blucher and I have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’ (18 June 1815). The Creevey Papers in which this account appears were not published until 1903. Somehow out of this description a conflated version arose, with someone else presumably supplying the ‘close-run’.
damn(ed) clever these Chinese (or dead clever chaps/devils these Chinese) Referring to a reputation for wiliness rather than skill. A Second World War phrase taken up from time to time by the BBC radio Goon Show (1951–60). Compare the line ‘Damn clever, these Armenians’ uttered by Claudette Colbert in the film It Happened One Night (US 1934).
damned if you do and damned if you don’t A modern version of ‘betwixt the devil and the deep blue sea’ – possibly of American origin. From The Guardian (1 July 1992): ‘It’s still very much a thing with women that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If women choose to stay at home and look after their children, now they’re accused of opting out of the workforce and decision-making because they’re afraid to look up to it.’
damn fine cup of coffee – and hot! ‘Kyle Maclachlan, who plays the FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks…is one of TV’s true originals. His much loved and oft-repeated catchphrase “Damn fine cup of coffee, and hot!” has indeed caught on and Maclachlan himself parodies it crisply in a TV commercial’ – Radio Times (15–21 June 1991).
damn the torpedoes – full speed ahead! Meaning, ‘never mind the risks [torpedoes = mines], we’ll go ahead any way’. A historical quotation. David Glasgow Farragut, the American admiral, said it on 5 August 1864 at the Battle of Mobile Bay during the Civil War.
(a) damsel in distress A young maiden in difficulty or in an embarrassing position and in need of rescue by a knight in shining armour, by way of allusion to supposed situations in medieval romances. Date of origin unknown. From Tobias Smollett, Roderick Random, Chap. 22 (1748): ‘Coming to the relief of a damsel in distress.’ The P. G. Wodehouse novel A Damsel in Distress (1919) eventually became a film musical (US 1937).
(the)