Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Sir: Ann Hales (Letters, 1 July) asks after the origin of "to cut corners", in your earlier headline "Nemesis of the golden boy who cut too many corners".
The OED documents the phrase from 1869, when Mark Twain described a gondolier who "cuts a corner so smoothly, now and then, or misses another gondola by such an imperceptible hair-breadth that I feel myself `scrooching', as the children say, just as one does when a buggy wheel grazes his elbow" (Innocents Abroad, chapter 23). The original use was, therefore, "to pass round a corner as closely as possible"; the modern extended use is recorded from the latter end of the 19th century.
"Scrooching", by the way (also scrouging, skrowdging, scroodging, etc), means "to squeeze close; to crouch or bend", and in Twain's context "to make one's body smaller or less conspicuous"; nowadays it's largely restricted to American English regional use, though an apparently related term appears in Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590).
Golden boy achieved popularity in the 1930s, as the title of Clifford Odets' Golden Boy: a Play in Three Acts (Random House, New York).
Nemesis predates the United States. As the Greek personification of retribution or vengeance she was well-established in Elizabethan England.
JOHN SIMPSON
Chief Editor
Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford University Press
Oxford
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments