cart » cat

Chiefly in:   put the cat before the horse

Classification: English – idiom-related – /r/-dropping

Spotted in the wild:

  • The feeling of the people is that the police stinks and it is rotten. You, within days of assuming the leadership of the force, announced what you regard as your reform programmes. Isn’t it like putting the cat before the horse? Why didn’t you carry out internal purge and cleansing first before this outward approach? (NigerianMuse, February 06, 2005)
  • A population policy that is not predicated on the result of a credible census, in our view, is tantamount to putting the cat before the horse. (THISDAYOnLine.com, Nov. 16, 2004)
  • Before deregulation, pundits had expected the Obasanjo government to put the nations infrastructures into good working order if not for anything to make the deregulation effective, unfortunately the present arrangement is akin to putting the cat before the horse. (Max Uba : Deregulation and the Empty Jerry Can, (Niger Delta Congress))
  • But perhaps to expect that the Attorney-General’s Office and the Government in general can eradicate corruption is to put the cat before the horse. (Daily Nation (Kenya), September 13, 1998)
  • I enjoyed this entry, but i think you put the cat before the horse. (Comment on online diary entry, Apr 9, 2001)

This eggcorn, which in some case might be a typo from omitting to hit one key, was reported by on the American Dialect Society mailing list by Mark Peters, who saw it in a student paper.

It seems to be most frequent in writings by people from Africa — maybe because the historical image of horse-drawn carts is less present there than in societies of European culture.

| 8 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2006/03/15 |

chase » cheese

Chiefly in:   cut to the cheese

Classification: English – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • Ho! Ho! Ho! Right, nae messin about, let’s cut to the cheese and deal with the facts. The real reason Rangers lost was because Celtic fans kept hiding the ball. (Evening Times (UK), Feb 15, 2006)
  • After about thirty minutes of being asked ridiculous questions about ridiculous things (where I got my MSCE, where I got my degree, what my teachers names were, etc), they cut to the cheese: Somebody called the shop and started spreading some serious subterfuge! (Neohapsis archives, Jul 09, 2004)
  • I’m looking for a primer, cut to the cheese type of book with some examples in C or assembly as talking about real-time is much easier than getting down and dirty. (comp.realtime, Aug 17, 1993)
  • Well, to cut to the cheese - what I hope to do with this post is to start a discussion about the features I’ve suggested below and also maybe get some new thoughts on the table. (rec.games.computer.ultima.dragons, Apr 15, 2000)

The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms has the following about _cut to the chase_:

> Get to the point, get on with it, as in _We don’t have time to go into that, so let’s cut to the chase_. This usage alludes to editing (cutting) film so as to get to the exciting chase scene in a motion picture. [Slang; 1920s]

I can only guess that the variant _cut to the cheese_ relies on a similar idea, only related to food: a cheese course is usually served at the end of a meal.

| 6 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2006/03/06 |