Cut Off the Nose to Spite the Face

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Karen. I’m calling from San Diego.

Hi, Karen. Welcome to the show. How can we help you?

Thank you. Twice recently, I’ve heard this phrase, to cut off your nose, to spite your face.

In both cases, the author in one case, Stephen Pinker, and the podcast host, Stephen Dubner, cited a source for the phrase. Stephen Dubner cited a history by Roger of Wendover, which talked about some nuns who were in an abbey who were going to get raided or something, and so they wanted to make sure that they weren’t sexually assaulted by the people.

And so the woman who ran the nunnery, the abbess is what they call her, cut off her nose and parted. I mean, the way they described it is just horrible.

And then all of her sisters did the same thing, and so then they were saved of at least that fate.

Oh, good lord. That’s pretty unenlightened.

So the whole idea behind the expression, though, is to go to ridiculous extremes to stop another bad thing from happening when the thing you’re going to do is bad enough.

Right. Oh, yeah, good point.

And that’s just pointing out kind of this terrible action that we would take.

We find examples of the same idea, but not the same expression, as far back as 611 in the writings of Publius Sirius, who was a mammographer. He wrote mimes, which were these exaggerated performances, these comical kind of acts.

And the version that he uses is to burn your neighbor’s house down in order to get revenge. Because if you burn your neighbor’s house, you’re likely to catch your own house on fire, too.

And we find this also, I think it was Henry IV in France. He said that he would have to burn Paris to save Paris. It’s kind of that same idea.

Here’s the thing about Steven Pinker and Stephen Dubner’s sources. I’ve seen the Steven Pinker passage. I haven’t heard the Dubner thing.

There may have been examples of nuns doing that, but cutting off someone’s nose as an act of vengeance or even as an official way of punishing them was fairly common, both in England, both in Europe, in Egypt, in Assyria. This was a thing that was kind of formalized, particularly for adultery and certain offenses, particularly if it involved a woman who was treated as a sexual object, where she was seen as attractive. In order to make her not attractive, they would cut off her nose.

Sometimes they would cut off her ears. Sometimes they would cut off her hands or breasts.

But, yeah.

Whoa.

That’s awful.

So, Karen, yeah, there may very well have been nuns that did what the two Stevens talked about, but there’s an older history to the whole concept.

Well, cool.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for calling, Karen.

Bye.

Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.