Clark in Fort Worth, Texas, asks about the expression “not to mince words” after seeing it in a New York Times Paul Krugman column. To mince is “to make small,” from the same word family as diminish, miniature, and minute. Mincing onions cuts them finely; mincing words pares down speech with caution, vagueness, or euphemism, so “not to mince words” means speaking bluntly. The same idea of smallness appears in phrases such as minced oath and in mincing steps. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “From Minced Onions to Minced Oaths, It’s About Cutting Away”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, it’s Clark Griffith from Fort Worth, Texas.
Hi, Clark. Welcome to the program.
Thank you.
What’s going on?
Well, I was reading an article in the New York Times the other day, and Paul Krugman used the phrase, not to mince words.
And I’ve seen the phrase a million times, and I’ve used it.
And I just wondered what its origins might be,
Because we mince onions, and we chop onions,
And we dice onions and we grate onions,
But we don’t chop great or dice words.
Good point.
Except if you’re the kind of editor that I always get.
So what did Paul Krugerman mean?
Could you tell what he meant?
Feet around the bush, basically.
Okay.
So he was saying, he says, I’m not going to lie to you, I’m going to tell you the truth. I’m not going to be vague, I’m going to be frank and explicit. Straightforward. Straightforward.
Okay, very good.
Yeah.
So mincing words, yeah. Mincing words and mincing onions is the relationship there? Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Mince in both of those senses goes back to the Latin word minutia, which means smallness. And you see it in other English words such as diminish, miniature, let’s see what else. Minutia. Minutia, yeah. Minute, like 60 minutes in an hour, right? Yep, yep. They all come from the same family that has to do with the idea of smallness.
And so if you’re mincing words, you’re chopping them very, very finely and being very careful and almost dainty with them.
I see. That makes a lot of sense.
Sort of not to put too fine a point on it.
Clark, does that fit your understanding of what Paul Krugman was talking about?
I still don’t quite get the sense of how chopping them into fine pieces equates into speaking them plainly.
Well, that’s a really good point.
It’s usually said in the negative, I’m not going to mince words.
Right, right.
Although you might talk about a minced oath, and this is where you have literally pared it down so that the meat of it isn’t there.
All that’s left is some kind of like inspecificness, some vagueness, like an amorphous cloud of poor meaning and poor clarity, right?
Or pink slime, as it were.
Or pink slime, as it were.
Verbal pink slime. Love it.
There are no chicken nuggets on this show.
But there are other minces as well, right?
So you can mince words and you can mince your steps, right?
Yes.
Like if you’re wearing heels and a skirt, you’ll take tiny mincing steps so that you don’t fall over, right?
Right, right.
If your knees are glued together or look like they are, yeah, mincing steps.
Because, I mean, you’re not going to walk like a lumberjack if you’re wearing a skirt, right?
That’s the opposite of mincing.
You’re going to like…
It depends on how tight the skirt is, I think.
I don’t know anything about that.
Clark, thank you so much for your call.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Take care, Clark.
Take care. Bye-bye.
Bye now.
Well, if a language question occurs to you while you’re in the kitchen or elsewhere, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.
