Q: In Can You Forgive Her (1864-65), one of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, a character complains about the “wretched cheeseparing Whig government.” How did “cheeseparing” come to mean penny-pinching?
A: When the term first appeared in the 16th century, it literally meant a paring, or shaving, from a rind of cheese.
The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an Anglican religious treatise that compares Roman Catholic relics to cheeseparings from the moon:
“Ye abused those that beleeued you, making them beleeue the Moone was made of a greene cheese, as they say: but were those blessed relikes so good as the cheese paring?” From The Supremacie of Christian Princes (1573), by John Bridges.
(Another treatise by Bridges, Defence of the Gouernment Established in the Church of Englande, 1587, includes an early version of a common proverb: “a foole and his money is soone parted.”)
The OED’s next “cheeseparing” citation is from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2, believed written in the late 1590s. In the play, Falstaff says the thin, vain Justice Shallow looks “like a man made after supper of a cheese paring.”
In the 19th century, Oxford says, “cheeseparing” came to mean “saving money by making numerous small cuts or adjustments; rigorous economizing, esp. of a mean or parsimonious kind.”
Merriam-Webster online has this explanation: “Presumably, the practice of paring off the rind so as to waste the minimum of cheese was viewed as an excessive form of frugality.”
The first OED citation for the parsimonious sense is from an article in The Parliamentary Review (July 19, 1834) on the retirement of Charles Grey, second Earl Grey, as Prime Minister.
During his four years in office, the article says, “There has been much cheeseparing concerning poor clerks, and small offices.”
In case you’re curious, the second Earl Grey is apparently the source of the name of the bergamot-flavored tea blend, though the earliest known evidence for the name dates from several decades after his death, according to the OED.
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