Talk:cut ice

According to the author Patrick O,Brien, the origin of the word stems from the Irokoi (?) people ?


 * Presumably Irokoi = Iroquois.
 * I would say the origin story is just one that Patrick O'Brien puts in the mouth of one of his characters, not necessarily one that he believes. See |cuts|cutting+no|any+ice%22+iroquois&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KJqdT4vzEemt6AHehfT_Dg&ved=0CD4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22cut|cuts|cutting%20no|any%20ice%22%20iroquois&f=false here.
 * I have found little credible support for the supposed Iroquois origin, but I haven't exhausted all possible sources.
 * I don't think that anyone has a good theory of the exact origin of this. One slightly boring (and hence likely true !) possibility is that it is analogous to not pay the bills/rent and similar expressions meaning "not having practical value", but using the late 19th century US ice industry as the source of a specific form of the metaphor. DCDuring TALK 19:55, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

RFM discussion: January 2021–February 2023
Move to cut ice, keeping redirect.

There are other collocations in which this expression can appear. The negative may appear some distance from cut ice, may not grammatically modify ice ("that doesn't cut (any) ice with him"), and may even be omitted altogether ("Would it cut any ice with him?"). There may be other redirects that should be added. DCDuring (talk) 22:55, 14 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I'm dubious about this, as cut no ice appears to be a standard term, as in Lexico. But I agree there are variants, which perhaps can be incorporated in the existing entry by means of quotes - I'm considering doing that with this: "a reduction of 5-10 min will cut little ice but cost a lot" DonnanZ (talk) 15:16, 12 May 2021 (UTC)


 * Having just heard someone talk about "whether [some line] would cut very much ice" with the someone, I looked up cut ice and upon finding we only had cut no ice I was going to move it for the same reason I see DCDuring already laid out. I'm going to move it now, leaving lots of redirects. The alternative would, I guess, be to have both the negative form cut no ice (which Donnanz is right is the form several other dictionaries lemmatize) and a positive form cut ice, but that seems duplicative... - -sche (discuss) 07:55, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I've also added several citations in which something positively, affirmatively does cut ice with someone, and no "no" is involved. - -sche (discuss) 07:58, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * This illustrates that negative polarity items often appear with the negative in the form of words like never, lack, or little or, without any obvious negative, in questions or conditional constructions. I'm not sure how we can achieve a higher degree of uniformity in our presentation of these items or, rather, better lead normal users to the right lemma and convey to interested users the full range of constructions in which negative polarity items appear. Redirects between headwords with and without an obvious negative (no, not), appropriate labels, and usage examples should all play a role and be applied more consistently than they are currently. DCDuring (talk) 16:32, 19 December 2022 (UTC)


 * This discussion seems resolved (moved by -sche), so I am marking it as such. &mdash; excarnateSojourner (talk &middot; contrib) 08:14, 25 February 2023 (UTC)