"…a lot more cut and dry"?
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Over the years, we've taken many self-appointed usage authorities to task for ignorant pronouncements presenting their personal reactions as facts of the standard language, or even as logical necessities. But everybody has similar reactions, and the point is not to deny the existence of usage conventions, or to pretend that you don't ever perceive something as a violation. As in all areas of cultural judgment, however, it's a good idea to examine the foundations of your responses, because sometimes it turns out that you're wrong about the facts or the logic.
I recently documented an experience of that general kind in a June 20 post "Incredulous, incredible, whatever…", where a usage that I perceived as a malapropism turned out to go back to Shakespeare.
This morning's example is even more surprising to me — "cut and dry" where I expected "cut and dried".
In an online video clip, Julia Jacobs explains the recent Sean Combs verdict — "Sean Combs Acquitted of Sex Trafficking but Found Guilty on Lesser Charges", NYT 7/2/2025:
Sean Combs, the hip-hop mogul who built a business empire around his personal brand, was convicted on Wednesday of transporting prostitutes to participate in his drug-fueled sex marathons, but acquitted of racketeering and sex trafficking, the most serious charges against him. Julia Jacobs, a New York Times culture reporter, explains the verdict.
At about 1:12 in the clip, she says [emphasis added]:
That charge is a lot more cut and dry, in that it has to do
with transporting
people over state lines
for the purposes of prostitution.
That triggered my usage alarm: "Gee, that's an interesting but illogical development. Dry as a participle parallel to cut? " (Much later in the process, I realized that cut and dry can be parallel adjectives…)
I had enough sense to look around, and found plenty of current examples. In fact, in the COCA corpus, there are 180 instances of "cut and dried" and 183 instances of "cut and dry".
The OED traces the modifier "cut and dry" back to 1643:
And the extended meaning back to 1684:
The "cut and dried" alternative has OED citations for the tobacco-leaf sense back to 1680, and for the "decided, settled, or prepared" sense back to 1664. So the two version have been in (free?) variation since the beginning — although I had managed to remain totally unaware of the "cut and dry" version until today.
In my defense, Google Ngrams shows that "cut and dried" had a more than 95% share in the 1940s, falling to around 2/3 in recent years:
(Though maybe that tells us more about proofreader than writers?)
Update — Based on the small sample in the comments, some people have always thought it was "cut and dry", others have always thought it was "cut and dried", and nobody (?) was ever aware of the alternative…
Barbara Phillips Long said,
July 3, 2025 @ 10:18 am
As someone who has always used “cut and dried,” and winced at “cut and dry,” this is fascinating. I had no idea the idiom originated in the tobacco trade. I have always assumed — without investigation — that it likely came from processing fish (gutting, scaling, and cleaning fish, cutting it into fillets, and drying it for packing and shipment). Turns out my personal folk etymology was completely wrong. Huh.
Anubis Bard said,
July 3, 2025 @ 10:24 am
Fascinating. I've always assumed it was "cut and dry," though I can't say I ever gave it much thought one way or another. Growing up when I did in Lancaster County, PA, there was still a fair amount of tobacco farming going on among the Amish, but I didn't know that was the source of the idiom.
Andreas Johansson said,
July 3, 2025 @ 11:35 am
I want to say I've never encountered the "dry" version before, but it's probably at least as likely I have but un- or semiconsciously treated it as a mispronunciation or miswriting.
J.W. Brewer said,
July 3, 2025 @ 1:17 pm
I think I would probably just interpret/understand someone saying "cut and dry" as having said "cut and dried" because it would be unusual for me to actually consciously register and focus on the missing-but-expected final /d/ of "dried." So my takeaway is that (perhaps because of his own professional focus on such matters) myl's ears must have been unusually attentive and fine-tuned for him to have noticed the unexpected variant in the first place.
FWIW, you can do a google books ngram reader comparison of "dried tobacco" against "dry tobacco." They're generally pretty close in frequency, with the "dried" option being consistently more common since 1928 after some previous shifts back and forth. Whether they are really synonymous free variants or mean subtly different things to those engaged in the tobacco business is not known to me. In my youthful addicted-tobacco-consumption days I typically only encountered the leaves after they were dry/dried and otherwise processed.
Daphne Preston-Kendal said,
July 3, 2025 @ 2:08 pm
I’ll pop my head in as apparently the first here to have always used (and thought I had only encountered) the ‘cut and dry’ variant.
‘Dry’ is an adjective itself, after all …
Jay Sekora said,
July 3, 2025 @ 2:24 pm
I was born in 1966 and grew up in Illinois, and always thought of the phrase as “cut and dry” (not “… dried”). Given that “cut and dried” seems well-attested, I presume I must have heard the “dried” variant at some point but maybe missed the /d/ since I wasn't expecting it. (I do remember reading the “dried” version and thinking it probably a mistake but one that made perfect sense.)
I think the variation might be because “dry” is pretty clearly an adjective, and “dried” is, morphologically, pretty clearly a passive participle derived from the verbal lemma, but “cut” serves both functions. So either “cut and dry” or “cut and dried” can seem more parallel depending on your analysis of the phrase.
Viseguy said,
July 3, 2025 @ 2:50 pm
I've always heard the "cut" as overwhelmingly participial and thus demanding "dried". "Cut and dry" sounds like two verbs to me, like "wash and wear", and thus all wrong for the purpose. I now see that I could care less about the distinction, and perhaps should, but old habits dry hard.
Viseguy said,
July 3, 2025 @ 3:05 pm
Of course, hmm, "wash and wear" is an adjective, but "cut and dry" isn't meant to be compounded from the two verbs in the same way. At least, I don't see it that way.
Terry K. said,
July 3, 2025 @ 4:14 pm
I feel like if using it literally, or as a metaphor referencing the literal meaning, "cut and dried" makes more sense. But if using it without any thought to a literal meaning, which would be the case for me using it, "cut and dry" makes more sense, since "dry" is an adjective, and the phrase is an adjective. Although, it's possible there's some meaning difference that might affect this. Indeed, I see Wikipedia suggests as such. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cut_and_dried
Joe said,
July 3, 2025 @ 5:55 pm
It's a perfect eggcorn: sounds very similar to a plausible alternative and isn't self-explanatory (I had no idea it was a tobacco metaphor either) so it's easy to mishear confidently.
The riddle is which version came first, which is the chicken and which is the eggcorn.
John Swindle said,
July 3, 2025 @ 9:26 pm
In Hawaiʻi, whether because of influence from Hawaiʻi Creole English or Chinese languages or Japanese or some other reason, people don't always hear or say or write the "d" in past participles ending in -ed. I thought that was what was happening in the example you gave. If it it's true that "cut and dry" has a history, I was probably mistaken.
janbany said,
July 3, 2025 @ 9:36 pm
Fascinating to learn that "cut and dry" and "cut and dried" have coexisted for centuries, despite my own blind spot for the former! It’s a humbling reminder to question our linguistic assumptions.
loonquawl said,
July 4, 2025 @ 1:55 am
@MarkLiberman – was the intent to write "[…]necessities. But everybody has[…]" at the beginning of the article, or did you mean "[…]necessities. But not everybody has[…]" ? Or is it irony?
Mark Liberman said,
July 4, 2025 @ 5:42 am
@John Swindle: "In Hawaiʻi, whether because of influence from Hawaiʻi Creole English or Chinese languages or Japanese or some other reason, people don't always hear or say or write the "d" in past participles ending in -ed."
It's not just Hawai'i — from the lecture notes for my Intro Linguistics course:
See also "Coal-fire(d)?", 2/8/2008.
Matthew J. McIrvin said,
July 4, 2025 @ 10:33 am
I always assumed "cut and dried" was the correct form, and the NGrams result suggests that is from seeing it in printed material from the mid-20th century.
Chas Belov said,
July 4, 2025 @ 4:57 pm
@Mark Liberman: I'm mostly firmly in the reduced form column of your table. I do say "shaved ice" – not sure why the question mark is there, but in reference to shaved ice in general, not the Hawaiian variety.
I notice packages of wax paper typically read "waxed paper" and menus read "iced tea."
Rick said,
July 4, 2025 @ 5:37 pm
Another team "dried" here. Never heard/saw "cut and dry" before now.
Michael Vnuk said,
July 5, 2025 @ 3:31 am
I think that I (Australian, born late 1950s) only ever encountered ‘cut and dried’ until about ten years ago, perhaps when I started reading more widely on the internet. My notes have examples of ‘cut and dry’ (often hyphenated) from then on, including an occurrence in a comment on Language Log in 2016 (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=25026#more-25026).
I was always going to look up why ‘cut and dry’ might exist, as it looked weird to me, but because it was mostly in American contexts, I assumed that it was just an American peculiarity, akin to using ‘toward’ or ‘lay of the land’ rather than ‘towards’ or ‘lie of the land’, the British English preferred forms, British English being the more common source for Australian English.
I initially guessed that ‘cut and dry’ might be similar to other reduced forms that Mark Liberman has noted. (One that is not listed is ‘rescue dog’, for a dog that has been ‘rescued’. So what do they call dogs that help with rescues? I would have called them ‘rescue dogs’.)
I also later thought that ‘cut and dry’ could have an alternative justification if both ‘cut’ and ‘dry’ are considered as simple adjectives, although the phrase still sounded clumsy to me. I will continue to use ‘cut and dried’.
Nonetheless, as ‘janbany’ wrote: ‘It’s a humbling reminder to question our linguistic assumptions.’