Cutter (pronounced kuht-er)
(1) A person employed to cut something, applied
especially to one who cuts fabric for garments.
(2) A machine, tool, knife or other device for cutting.
(3) In nautical use, a single-mast sailing vessel, very
similar to a sloop but having its mast set somewhat farther astern, about
two-fifths of the way aft measured on the water line.
(4) In nautical use, a ship's boat having double-banked
oars and one or two lugsails.
(5) In nautical use, a lightly armed government vessel
used to prevent smuggling and enforce the customs regulations (known also as a revenue
cutter).
(6) In psychiatry & psychology, a patient who
repeatedly inflicts self-injury by cutting their flesh, a behavior
traditionally associated with negative emotions.
(7) A person employed as a film editor, the titled
derived from when physical film stock was physically cut with blades and
re-joined.
(8) A small, light sleigh, usually single-seated and
pulled by one horse.
(9) In construction, a brick suitable for cutting and
rubbing, traditionally yellow and used for face-work (also called a rubber and
now mostly obsolete but still use in restoration work).
(10) In industrial meat production (in the US government’s
grading of beef), a lower-quality grade between utility and canner, used mostly
in processed products such as hot dog sausages.
(11) In industrial meat production, a pig weighing
between 68-82 kg (150-181 lb), from which fillets and larger joints are cut.
(12) In industrial meat production, an animal yielding
inferior meat, with little or no external fat and marbling.
(13) In baseball, a variation of the fastball pitch.
(14) In cricket, as "leg cutter", a ball bowled by a fast bowler using finger spin to move
the ball from leg to off (when delivered to a right-handed batsman); unrelated
to the cut shot ("leg cut" & "off cut") except in the adjectival sense whereby a batsman might be
described as “an expert cutter”, “an inept cutter” etc. The "off cutter" is a delivery which moves in the other direction.
(15) In dental classification, a foretooth; an incisor.
(16) In UK prison slang, a ten-pence (10p) piece, so
named because it is the coin most often sharpened by prison inmates to use as a
weapon.
(17) In medical slang, a surgeon (also modified to reflect
specialties, neurosurgeons being “head cutters”, thoracic surgeons “chest cutter”
etc).
(18) In the slang of criminology, an offender who
habitually uses balded weapons to inflict injuries (also known as “slashers”).
(19) In film & television production, a flag, plate
or similar instrument for blocking light.
(20) An officer in the exchequer who notes by cutting on
the tallies the sums paid (obsolete).
(21) In slang, a disreputable ruffian (obsolete).
(22) As Cutter Expansive Classification (CEC), a library classification system, now obsolete although the core structure remains the basis for the system used by the US Library of Congress.
1375–1425: From the Middle English kittere & cuttere,
the construct being cut(t) + -er. Cut
was from the Middle English cutten,
kitten, kytten & ketten (to
cut) (the Scots form was kut & kit), of North Germanic origin, from the
Old Norse kytja & kutta, from the Proto-Germanic kutjaną & kuttaną (to cut), of uncertain origin, though there may be links
with the Proto-Germanic kwetwą (meat,
flesh) (related to the Old Norse kvett (meat)).
It was akin to the Middle Swedish kotta (to cut or carve with a knife) (the
Swedish dialectal forms were kåta &
kuta (to cut or chip with a knife)), the
Swedish kuta & kytti (a knife), the Norwegian Bokmål kutte (to cut), the Norwegian Nynorsk kutte (to cut), the Icelandic kuta (to cut with a knife), the Old
Norse kuti (small knife) and the Norwegian
kyttel, kytel & kjutul (pointed slip of wood used to
strip bark). It displaced the native
Middle English snithen (from the Old
English snīþan) although the German schneiden survives still in some
dialects as snithe or snead. The –er
suffix was from the Middle English –er
& -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought most likely to have been
borrowed from the Latin –ārius where,
as a suffix, it was used to form adjectives from nouns or numerals. In English, the –er suffix, when added to a
verb, created an agent noun: the person or thing that doing the action
indicated by the root verb. The use in
English was reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant -our),
from the Latin -ātor & -tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr.
When appended to a noun, it created the noun denoting an occupation or
describing the person whose occupation is the noun.
A glove cutter at his bench at Omega srl Gloves (the Omega Glove Factory), Rione Sanità district, Naples, Italy. In American Pastoral (1997), Philip Roth (1933–2018) wrote that no one was able to make gloves as well as “some small factory in Rione Sanità in Naples.” In the 1980s, most glove production moved from Europe to the Far East and it's believed there are now fewer than a hundred master-certified glove cutters left in the world, the title formalized in seventeenth century France and conferred only after years of mentorship.
Night Suspect, a British Coast Guard Cutter in Pursuit (1958), oil on canvas by Montague Dawson (1890-1973).
As a surname derived from occupation, Cutter emerged in
the late twelfth century, based on the agent noun cutter (“one who cuts
something” or “one who shapes or forms by cutting") from the verb cut From
the 1630s it came to be used to describe an "instrument or tool for
cutting", the use spreading as specialized tools and machines were
developed. In nautical use, beginning in
1792, it was applied to a range of small, single-mast vessels, a borrowing from
the earlier use for a “double-banked boat belonging to a ship of war”, noted
since 1745 and the rationale is unrecorded but it may have been either because
of the similar lines of the hull or the more romantic idea of “cutting through” (moving quickly) the water. The original
ships were the “revenue cutters", lightly-armed government vessels commissioned
for the prevention of smuggling and the enforcement of the customs regulations.
The use was therefore for some time
restricted to vessels cutter-rigged, but the name has survived to transcend the
original specification, almost all revenue ships now powered while the handful
of sailed-ships are schooner-rigged. Modifiers
are used to describe various specialized tools used for cutting including biscuit
cutter, cigar cutter, bolt cutter, box-cutter, gem cutter, glass cutter, leaf-cutter et al. The original box cutters, dating from 1871,
were those employees with the task of “cutting boxes” while the installed box
cutters were pieces of large industrial plant, first noted in 1890; the familiar
modern box cutter (hand-held bladed tool for cutting cardboard) first sold in
1944. A cookie cutter is literally a
device used to cut shapes from a sheet of pastry dough but is also used figuratively
to describe to things which are un-original or un-imaginative. Cutter is a noun & adjective; the noun
plural is cutters.
Cutters: Non-Suicidal Self-Injury (NSSI)
What cutters do.Cutters are the best known example of self-harmers, the
diagnosis of which is described in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA)
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM) as non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI). NSSI is defined as the deliberate,
self-inflicted destruction of body tissue without suicidal intent and for
purposes not socially sanctioned; it includes behaviors such as cutting,
burning, biting and scratching skin. Behaviorally,
it’s highly clustered with instances especially prevalent during adolescence and
the majority of cases being female although there is some evidence the
instances among males may be under-reported. It’s a behavior which has long interested and perplexed
the profession because as something which involves deliberate and intentional
injury to body tissue in the absence of suicidal intent (1) it runs counter to the
fundamental human instinct to avoid injury and (2) as defined the injuries are
never sufficiently serious to risk death, a well-understood reason for self-harm. Historically, such behaviors tended to be
viewed as self-mutilation and were thought a form of attenuated suicide but in
recent decades more attention has been devoted to the syndrome, beginning in
the 1980s at a time when self-harm was regarded as a symptom of borderline
personality disorder (BPD) (personality disorders first entered DSM when
DSM-III was published in 1980), distinguished by suicidal behavior, gestures,
threats or acts of self-mutilation.
Clinicians however advanced the argument the condition should be thought
a separate syndrome (deliberate self-harm syndrome (DSHS)), based on case studies
which identified (1) a patient’s inability to resist the impulse to injure themselves,
(2) a raised sense of tension prior to the act and (3) an experience of
release or at least partial relief after the act. That a small number of patients were noted as
repeatedly self-harming was noted and it was suggested that a diagnosis called repetitive
self-mutilation syndrome (RSMS) should be added to the DSM. Important points associated with RSMS were (1)
an absence of conscious suicidal intent, (2) the patient’s perpetually negative
affective/cognitive which was (temporarily) relieved only after an act of
self-harm and (3) a preoccupation with and repetitiveness of the behavior. Accordingly, NSSI Disorder was added to the DSM-5
(2013) and noted as a condition in need of further study.
Although interest in the cutters spiked in the 1990s,
papers had been published as early as the 1930s and the literature suggests something of a consensus among clinicians it should be regarded a matter of self-mutilation, such acts a form of attenuated suicide. Accordingly, all non-fatal and deliberate
forms of self-injury tended to be viewed as suicide attempts, regardless of
whether there was any expressed suicidal intent and it wasn’t until the 1960s that any volume of doubt emerged. That was significant,
not only because self-injury was coming to be understood as something distinct
from attempted suicide but that it implied the instance of attempted suicide
was significantly overstated, something of interest to many. This led to the coining of the novel word “parasuicide”, perhaps an indication the
profession still preferred to think cutting a sub-set rather than anything
distinct.
Cutters' scars, fresh & fading.
For clinicians, NSSI can at the margins be a difficult
diagnosis. To fit the diagnostic
criteria in the DSM-5, NSSI must be intentional and deliberate but acts
sometimes occurs during dissociative episodes so a judgment needs to be made
determining whether an act can be held to be intentional if the patient is
detached from reality. As a definitional
matter. there’s also the issue that if the motivation is to “feel something”
some degree of intentionality seems at least implied but these examples do
illustrate why NSSI among those suffering an episode of dissociation need even
more carefully to be assessed before a diagnosis is decided. There’s also a threshold criterion for the
injury suffered, wounds needing to be “moderately intense” to qualify, thus the
exclusion of such as lip-biting, scab & skin picking, hair pulling and nail-biting,
even if these injuries might demand clinical care in another context (and may
well be relevant in assessment measures).
Some extent of a “destruction of body tissue” is thus required and the current
DSM-5 definition specifies bleeding or bruising. However, it’s noted in cases studies that while
minor and highly normative behaviors such as lip-biting, skin picking and hair
pulling are excluded: (1) When severe they may be indicative of another
specific condition such as trichotillomania (hair-pulling disorder) or excoriation
(skin-picking disorder) rather than NSSI and (2) repeated and obsessional
instances of behavior that might otherwise be considered mild and normative might
appropriately be diagnosed as NSSI.
Case Fatality Rates by Suicide Method (8 indicative US states, 1989-1997)
Although the instances of death resulting from cutting are
low, it’s clear many patients engage in NSSI behaviors while experiencing
thoughts of suicide and while the evidence suggests many report being resigned
to death as a consequence of cutting, actual suicidal thoughts and hopes for
death are markedly higher in those exhibiting suicidal behaviors. Intriguingly, it seems some may engage in NSSI
as a way to avoid acting on thoughts of suicide; NSSI for these patients serving
to regulate and reduce suicidal thoughts and intentions. So it’s clear that in both thought and
behavior, there’s some overlap between NSSI and suicidal thoughts meaning that
even if a cutter’s injuries are (medically) minor, the condition should not be
thought trivial although, for practical purposes, NSSI and suicidal behaviors
need still to be categorized separately.
Cutting is also special in that it is so overt, unlike other forms of
self-harm such as alcohol & drug abuse, risky behavior or neglecting to
follow a prescribed treatment for a chronic condition. There does however seem to be a pronounced
co-morbidity between NSSI and eating disorders, the obvious link being a
patient’s relationship with their body, NSSI being in some sense a compensatory
behavior and form of self-punishment. Data
is clearly accumulating but the APA’s editorial committee seem not yet ready to
make major structural changes: in the DSM-5-TR (Text Revision, 2022) although codes
were included both suicidal behavior and NSSI, Suicidal Behavior Disorder (SBD)
and NSSI Disorder remained in the section “Conditions
for Further Study”.
US Coast Guard Legend Class National Security Cutter.
