where does the expression"cut the mustard" come frome?

Question

my girlfriend wants to know. i told her it was a nice way of asking for a b.j. in public. am i right?

Answer 1

It seems that the phrase is of early twentieth-century US origin. The first recorded use of the phrase is by O Henry in 1907, in a story called The Heart of the West: “I looked around and found a proposition that exactly cut the mustard”. The modern sense of the idiom is “to succeed; to have the ability to do something; to come up to expectations”. But why that exact phrase, nobody seems to know. Cutting mustard is hardly an arduous endeavour, after all, and there seems not to be any older phrase to which it is related.

One explanation that is sometimes given is that the phrase is a corrupted form of cut the muster, in some way connected with the military muster or assembly of troops for inspection. However, if you cut a muster, presumably you do not attend it, so how this can be connected with the idea of excellence is far from clear. The clinching argument for this not being the source is that nobody has found the supposedly original phrase cut the muster anywhere.

It’s much more likely that it’s a development of the long-established use of mustard as a superlative, as in phrases such as keen as mustard. In the nineteenth century in America, mustard was used figuratively to mean something that added zest to a situation, and the proper mustard was something that was the genuine article. The move from genuine to excellent is just a short step. O Henry used the word in the sense of something excellent in Cabbages and Kings in 1904: “I’m not headlined in the bills, but I’m the mustard in the salad dressing just the same”.

But how the idea of cutting the mustard became included are not known.

As I can’t fully answer your question, let me present as a consolation prize the reason why mustard is so named. It derives from an ancient French way of making a hot condiment by grinding up the seeds of various members of the cabbage family in the freshly pressed juice of grapes, then called the moust (must in modern English). A French word moustarde appeared to describe this mixture, which was brought into English in the twelfth century and quickly settled to the modern spelling. (Luckily moust and moustarde shifted their spelling and pronunciation in the same direction down the years, so their connection is still obvious.)

Answer 2

Mustard has a long history of being used as a metaphor for something powerful or biting. First in a negative context, as in John Heywood's A dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of All the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue (1546):

Where her woordes seemd hony, . . . Now are they mustard.
And somewhat later in a positive sense. From James Howell's Lexicon Tetraglotton (1659):

As strong as Mustard.
The origin of the cut portion of the phrase is uncertain. It could be a reference to cutting a mustard seed, a very difficult task. Or it could be a conflation with a cut above, to cut the mustard is to be better than mustard.

The phrase is also rendered as to be the mustard and it's very similar to keen as mustard.

Various explanations that it is a corruption of a military phrase to cut muster or that mustard is a difficult crop to harvest have no evidence to support them.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition; ADS-L)

Answer 3

" Cut the mustard" has several Meanings: Here are a couple of them.
(#1) It means to "Achieve the required Standard of your job duties in your workplace."{Also to do the same in your personal life.}
(#20) If he/she was in the Military & did not perform the basic training etc. or slacked off on their duties, it was said "They'll couldn't cut the mustard" & sometimes got demoted to a lower rank or left all together. In other words in these instances the people were not "Up to Snuff."

Answer 4

This alludes to the piquancy and zest of mustard. 'Up to mustard' or just 'mustard' meant good quality in the same way as 'up to snuff'. Cutting the mustard is just a variant of the same notion. It is recorded inthe 1905 edition of 'Dialect Notes':

Answer 5

my dad, it means "passing gas". my dad did this all the time when I was a kid.

and no that is not a way for you to politely ask your girl for a B.J.

Answer 6

it can mean aything you want it to mean, but I always thought it was asking who farted, because mustard stinks..