Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Since the leading edge of an airplane wing is first to part the air and critical in the design of an aircraft, I understand the importance. The bleeding edge has become very common in technical writing. It seems like a poor description for the newest or best creations, but it does indicate some risk to life or limb. The bleeding edge was probably derived from the “dark side” of cutting edge projects gone bad. That leads me to the question of what is first the cutting edge or the bleeding edge?
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The relatively lengthy Wikipedia article on “bleeding edge” claims that— within the computer industry—the term implies a potentially risky technology that’s ahead of the cutting edge. The idea that bleeding precedes cutting seems a little odd to me, but Wikipedia’s view of the origins of the phrase seems to be borne out by early discussions of it. For example, here’s an excerpt from the 1997 essay “Bleeding Edge Epistemology” by Brian T. Pentland:
But when things go wrong, one can quickly end up on the “bleeding edge,” a pun that I first heard from the support engineers at DBI.
http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0 … x8KAu_YBrg
Pentland’s obviously talking about people dealing with brand-new technologies that haven’t been debugged yet.
Looking at web discussions and datable entries on books.google.com, I get the feeling that the phrase had been floating around as early as the early 80s, but it only really started gaining widespread currency even within the computer industry in the early or mid 1990s—and then “broke out” in 1996. Most citations before the 90s refer to surgical techniques or Anne Rice novels.
“Cutting edge” was almost certainly the template, and I think Pentland is probably right to call “bleeding edge” a bit of self-conscious wordplay—which disqualifies it for eggcorn status. (I’ll let someone else discuss whether or not “bleeding edge” is technically a pun.)
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I agree with Pat—it is my hunch that “bleeding edge” took off from “cutting edge”, in this particular jocular way computer geeks often have when they use language. Well, that’s how I use “bleeding edge” anyway.
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