Transcript of “Cut to the Chase Means Get to What Everyone Wants”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, Grant. This is Rod Knowles in Alexandria, Louisiana.
And hello, Mark also.
Hi, Rod.
Hey, Rod.
Welcome to the program.
I’m in the commercial real estate business in central Louisiana, and a strange exchange of words took place twice in the same week, so I thought I’d call you folks on it.
Working with a Dallas developer who was a seller, and the buyer said the property’s not quite worth that much, and the seller says, well, let’s cut to the chase.
All right, let’s leave that scene and go to my second and last scene.
I’m in a small town in Marksville, Louisiana, and the buyer says, the seller’s asking too much. Let’s cut to the chase.
Well, I know what that means. And I assume, you know, when we use language for our business, we assume other people know what it means also.
I know that means let’s get to the best price. But it occurred to me, where did this come from?
Do you have any guesses at all, Rod?
I think there’s two guesses. It’s either the horse race industry, and, you know, we’re going to cut to the chase, the horses chasing each other. Or it goes back to, you know, European days for the fox hunt, for the chase of the fox. But that’s just a guess.
That’s just a guess.
Well, those are both really good guesses, Rod, but it doesn’t come from either of those. It comes from movie making.
If you want to keep a viewer’s interest in a movie, you worry that the dialogue is dragging, the scene’s getting a little boring. What you do is you cut to the car chase. You cut to the really exciting part of the movie.
And they were using this back as early as the 1920s in making movies. Writers would actually say, now we cut to the chase. And then by the 1940s or so, that expression joined pop culture, just talking about cutting to the chase, exactly like you were describing. Let’s get down to business. Let’s get on with it, as you would do in a real estate sale.
So it comes from the world of moviemaking. And that verb to cut, Martha, is specifically about cutting film, literally cutting pieces of film and splicing them together.
So drop it on the floor, cut to the chase, let’s get to the action.
Right.
Well, I’ve been in some deals that felt like a car chase. So that makes all the things in the world.
I hope not a car crash.
No, no.
I’m so much better informed, I can’t wait to tell people I’ve got it all figured out.
Well, you ought to be in pictures, Rod.
No, no, no.
Take care of yourself.
Thank you.
Be well out there.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Take care.
Sometimes you’re just doing everyday business. You think it’s just another day and something pops out of your mouth and it’s not an M&M that you couldn’t swallow.
It’s a weird phrase or idiom and you’re like, wait a second. Why do I say that? Should I be saying that? What does that mean? Did I just offend someone?
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