“Cutting a check” is a far more common phrase than “tearing off a check,” because for years checks weren’t perforated, so bankers had to actually use a metal device to cut them. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Cutting vs. Tearing Off a Check”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Barbara from Oceanside, California.
Hey, Barbara, welcome.
Hello, Barbara, what’s up?
So I was curious about a phrase. My mom was writing some checks the other morning, and I was just asking her if she had cut a check for the gardener. And so the phrase, you know, to cut a check, I was just curious where that comes from.
Oh, the cutting part?
Yeah, because it’s just, you know, usually you write a check. So, yeah, the cut part. You didn’t get out the scissors, right? It was already perforated in the checkbook, right?
Well, it was the gardener. It was probably those big blades, right?
Yeah, yeah. So it’s just such an interesting phrase. And I don’t know if it comes from, like, the banking industry or because it sounds so, like, professional and formal.
Yeah, that’s it. It’s the banking industry. And it’s old-fashioned. It comes from the 1800s. When you didn’t have perforated checks and you maybe had a big sheet of checks and you would literally cut them. Sometimes there’d be a metal rod bar or kind of like a metal ruler that you would just throw across the checks and then tear the paper across the hard edge. And that’s how you would cut the check.
Sometimes the cutting the check just simply meant that when you were producing a lot of checks all at once, saying paying all of your employees or paying all of your vendors. And well into the 1950s, it still pretty much stayed jargon. And then shortly thereafter, it starts to pop up in the everyday language where you can now say, heck, I cut checks online where it never reaches paper. I cut a check to a company and it just goes from account to account.
Oh, interesting. And the checks that they would cut would just be like, would they be small in size like they are now?
Oh, they were a wide variety of sizes. They hadn’t yet standardized. Some of the old checks actually looked more like stock certificates with beautiful scroll work and stuff. They were a little more formal because you’ve got to remember they didn’t have all these security features. And to make a check seem really important and powerful and something not to be messed with, they would put all of the weight of the printing industry and all the weight of the baking industry into these documents to make them like, whoa, that’s really fancy scroll work and fancy inks and beautiful writing and gorgeous fonts and whatever that they could do.
So, yeah, they were sometimes very different from what we see now. But they have the same purpose, to get money from person to person without having to carry cash.
Well, great. Well, gosh, thanks so much for answering the curiosity.
Barbara, thank you very much.
Thank you. Have a good one. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
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