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Posted by Mark Liberman

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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:

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…

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Posted by Victor Mair

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When I was a wee lad and went to bible school each week, I had a hard time comprehending just whom were all of those epistles in the New Testament addressed to.  Of course, there are many other books in the New Testament, a total of 27, but the ones that intrigued me most were the 9 Pauline letters to Christian churches that we refer to as "epistles".  I was most captivated by these 9 books and I wanted to know what kind of people they were, what their communities were like, what their ethnicities were, and, above all, even way back then, what languages they spoke.

These communities were called:

Romans
Corinthians — Paul wrote two epistles to them
Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
Thessalonians — Paul also wrote two epistles to them

I knew who the Romans were, and what language they spoke, so no problem there.  Moreover, I was aware from a sense of architectural history that a Corinthian capital column was a Greek creation.  Several of the others had a Greek ring to them as well.  But the one that attracted my attention above all the others was the letter to the Galatians, who were located in a region of Anatolia known as Galatia.  Somehow Galatians didn't seem to fit the Mediterranean paradigm that I suspected for the other communities.

Only much later did I learn that the Galatians were a type of Gauls, i.e., Celts, who had migrated from what is now France to what is now Türkiye.  What, pray tell, would have driven them there so far from the north to the south, when most population movements during the Holocene Epoch (last ten thousand years) generally were from south to north?

The Gauls and their confrères were outstanding miners.  They mined a variety of minerals, including gold, iron, and tin.  The latter was important in its own right, but also for alloying with copper to produce bronze, the metallurgy of which the Celts were renowned for.  Above all, however, the Celts / Gauls were masters of saltmining, which is reflected in these toponyms:  Hallstatt, Hallein, Halle, G(h)alich.

Even today, though, when I think of Celts, a bucolic picture of shepherds with their flocks comes to mind, and it's not difficult to imagine that, just as the Celts went wandering in search of metal sources, so they were ever in quest of better pastures for their sheep.

It is no wonder that, being the skillful shepherds that they were, the Celts would become the premier wool weavers we know them to be.  It just so happens that one of the textile types they perfected was diagonal twill.  If you add some colored thread into the warp and the weft in a repeated pattern, you get plaid, beloved of the Gaelic Scots still to this day. It is not an accident that the earliest and best preserved plaids in the world are found in the salt mines of the Celtic areas of Europe, as well as in the bogs of northern Europe, whose tannin preserves organic materials, including plaids and other woolen textiles (not to mention human bodies!).  The only other place on earth I know of for the early conservation of woolen textiles, including very early plaids from the same period as those in the northern European bogs and Celtic salt mines of north central Europe, is the Tarim Basin, especially Qizilchoqa (near Qumul [Hami]) and Zaghunluq (near Chärchän [Qiemo]). both of which have highly saline soils and exquisite Bronze Age woolen textiles, including plaids.  I have tasted the deposits exposed in a tunnel 400 meters down at Hallstatt and from the tableland where Ur-David (Chärchän Man) was discovered.  You can use them as table salt to flavor your food.

The Celts / Gauls certainly had a wanderlust, and that would explain what brought them to Anatolia — and other far-flung places.

Selected readings

• "Roman curse tablets" (1/24/25) — Gaulish inscriptions
• "An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China" (1/25/19)

[Thanks to Elizabeth J. W. Barber, J. P. Mallory, and Douglas Q. Adams]

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