GLOSSARY / It is better to be the cutter than the cut

SOME poetry to begin with. Look up the verb 'cut' in the Oxford English Dictionary and you find this: 'To penetrate with an edged instrument which severs the continuity of the substance'. Like all of the OED's best definitions, there is something faintly robotic and mad about this - a sense of excessive, undeviating purpose in the way that it paraphrases three letters with 70. What results is not a human thing but a beautifully crafted machine that closes with the silky snick of a fine pair of shears. Full stop, job done, no buts.

If you really didn't know what cut meant, you would have to rely on that definition alone because the etymology offers no metaphorical clues1 , just minor changes in spelling. Like certain animals that appear to have been left untouched by evolutionary pressures, 'cut' essentially retains its primeval shape, a word so plain and hard-edged in the mouth that it needs no adaptation. (It has only been in common use since the 14th century, but the OED conjectures an Old Teutonic root, kut.)

There's an elemental feel to the action, too. It is perhaps the most ancient human technology there is, and the word still has a charge of atavistic energy which goes some way to explaining its popularity in modern life, in particular as a word used to describe financial reduction or retrenchment of any kind.

Like any sharp instrument, the word can cut both ways; for those doing the cutting the image is probably that of a scalpel or a farmer's axe - they are engaged in surgery or clearing dead wood. For those protesting, the image is more brutal, the slasher with a knife, the butcher3 with a cleaver, the logger destroying the rainforest.

The OED's first citation for a financial usage of the verb is as recent as 1881, from the Chicago Times, though it is hard to believe that British parliamentary history offers no earlier example. It remains in inverted commas in the early citations, rather self-consciously dressed as metaphor. Indeed, that protective enclosure is still in use in 1946, as if the word was felt to have a dangerous edge and needed a sheath.

But cut owes its real fame to Margaret Thatcher. It did well during her time in office, opening new branches everywhere, prospering in an atmosphere that rang to the whispering chime of the sharpening steel. Malcolm Bradbury, who wrote a novella called Cuts (a satirical account of an independent television company - Eldorado Television, no less), even names the annus mirabilis.

'It was the summer of 1986,' his book begins, 'and everywhere there were cuts . . . They were incising heavy industry, they were slicing steel, they were - by no longer cutting much coal - cutting coal . . . They were chopping at the schools, hewing away at the universities, scissoring at the health service, sculpting the hospitals, shutting down operating theatres - so that, in one sense at least, there were actually far fewer cuts than before.'

There was no ambiguity in these hacking battles - for one group of people all cuts were bad, for another they were, if not actually good, at least unavoidable (occasionally, some of the wetter combatants might even concede a 'regrettable').

These days, though, matters are more confused, a little greyer in their contrasts. Interest rate cuts have given the word a benign aspect and blunted its severity, while its association with the words Mortgage Tax Relief can send a chill through some of those who in the past have pressed the blade home with greatest determination.

Defence cuts (shouldn't that be defence blunts?) provide the most pleasing inversion though - it can't be long, surely, before the slogan 'Stop the cuts', at one time as indispensible an item of picket-line equipment as the badge-bedecked donkey-jacket and the keffiyah, will appear on elegant copperplate placards being wielded by Home Counties matrons with Hermes headscarves and retired army officers attired in tweed deerstalkers.

1 From the Middle English clew, a ball of yarn or thread. Thus a ball of thread used to lead one through a maze. To be 'without a clue' is to be in trouble.

2 From the Latin primaevus, in the first period of life.

3 From the Old French and Provencal bochier, from boc meaning he-goat. Thus a dealer in goat's flesh.