The problem with cutting to the quick

‘At least he didn’t say “Cut the cheese”,’ said my husband, suddenly making a barking noise like a seal, which is his attempt at laughter. He was commenting on a remark by Amol Rajan, the affable presenter on Today. An interviewee was invited to ‘cut to the quick’. Of course he meant ‘cut to the chase’, as he might have realised, without time to revisit the slip.

The quick in cut to the quick does not mean something fast. It is the sentient flesh that might be nicked when you trim your nails. When I looked at the earliest quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary, I had a momentary vision of wounded giraffes and elephants: ‘Nor can the graffe joyn to its trunk unlesse the rinde be refreshed, and cut to the quick with the knife.’

Of course it doesn’t say giraffe but graffe, by which the author, John Evelyn (who knew all about trees), meant ‘graft’.

Cut to the quick is still used figuratively, as by that old-fashioned modernist George Santayana in The Last Puritan, the only novel he published, in 1935 at the age of 71, which turned out to be a bestseller.

I say ‘old-fashioned’ because in a poem like ‘Avila’ (1901), Santayana starts well enough: ‘Again my feet are on the fragrant moor /Amid the purple uplands of Castile, /Realm proudly desolate and nobly poor, /Scorched by the sky’s inexorable zeal.’ But then he gets going with the poetic diction (diadem, hath, o’er, tarry, perchance) as his thoughts grow mistier.

Anyway, in the novel, the narrator says: ‘Damned unfair, too, to my poor father who had made every sacrifice for me, and was cut to the quick.’

Cut to the chase, as a phrase, came in with motion pictures, and presumes that the chase will be more interesting than the stuff cut.