Your brother-in-law the motormouth beats around the bush for so long about something that in exasperation you tell him to “cut to the chase.” The hosts explain the Hollywood roots of this phrase. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Roots of “Cut to the Chase””
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. This is Kat calling from Newington, Connecticut.
Hi, Kat. What’s up?
Hey.
Well, here’s the deal. I was sending an email to a friend the other day, and I needed to be brief. So I told him, well, I’ll just cut to the chase.
And I know what it means, and he knew what it meant, but I think I need you guys to tell me what I really mean by cut to the chase. Where did it come from?
It’s actually very naughty, and you should be embarrassed.
Oh, really? Awesome.
No, no, no, no. I’m kidding. I’m teasing you. All this time, everyone’s been blushing all around you. That job you didn’t get, here’s why.
No, it’s actually really kind of cool, actually, I think. The real origin, this is pretty cool. Kind of cool. What kind of chase do you think it might be, Kat?
Oh, gosh. You know, I’m so crazy busy with the holiday. If I had time to formulate a theory, then I probably wouldn’t need to call you guys.
Are you serious? Is it something as simple as that? A car chase?
In movies. Pretty much. You know, when they cut the scene, you know, they got all this drama. The heroine’s got the tears in her eyes and the hero’s driving to save her. It’s a good part of the movie, right?
We all want to just get right to it. That’s right. What we want to see is the action. We don’t want the drama. We don’t want to see the chickens and, you know, the sunset and all that stuff. We want the car chase. We want the dust cloud, right?
Oh, good chickens. Come on.
Yeah, you’ll find this dates in metaphorical use back at least to the 1940s, the mid-1940s. And you’ll find in literal uses where in scripts, they actually, as early as the 1920s when movies were still really new, you can see in the scripts the directions that say, cut to the chase.
No, really. How about them apples?
That’s really fantastic. Yeah. You know, it’s silly how we think that something’s going to be so complex and then just, you know, the obvious eludes us. The simplest solution is almost always the right one.
Fantastic. Well, thanks a lot, guys.
All right. Take off.
All right. See you. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Kat.
Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
Most of the language I know that transformed itself from insider jargon of Hollywood into mainstream English came from Variety magazine, so I was kind of surprised to find this one. It’s just pretty much a work-a-day term used by film crews.
Yeah, interesting, huh?
Yeah. If you’ve got a question about language, you want to hear something about slang, you want some car noises from Grant or Martha, give us a call. 1-877-929-9673. That’s 1-877-WAYWORD.
