Eggcorn Forum

The other day I heard an interviewer on the radio say something like this to his interviewee: “We only have a minute left, so you’re gonna have to cut to the quick”. This substitution for “cut to the chase” makes sense because, even though “quick” sounds nothing like “chase”, the idea of quickness in the sense of speed obviously fits the sense of “cut to the chase”. A Google search yielded at least 200 unique hits that had this meaning, for instance:

Yeah they are crazy long and cumbersome to read, but let’s cut to the quick.

Let’s cut to the quick; Graham Harrell is a lightning rod this preseason.

Because, and let’s cut to the quick, Carmelo Anthony never ever would’ve made that remark about a black NBA player’s contract…

To investigate whether the substitution happens in the other direction, I googled “cut me to the chase” and got around three dozen unique hits, but few of them had the sense of “cut me to the quick”. Instead, most of them meant the same as “beat me to the punch”, as in:

I was going to, but you cut me to the chase, I suppose.

You cut me to the chase! I was thinking the exact same thing!

I have actually been meaning to write a post about the disturbing preponderance of mullets in Russia for a while now, but it seems that an actual journalist cut me to the chase and wrote surprisingly well-researched inquiry into the mullet phenomenon.

It’s a mystery to me how this phrase went through such a meaning mutation.