It always irritates me when the press talks about ‘a machete’ being used in a crime. The word seems to be laden with meaning – you know, primitive, savage, uncivilised. Worse even than a knife, or even a gun. Too up close & personal. Only barbarous black men use machetes to make their point, when driven beyond endurance. higher civilisations use sophisticated technology, requiring much expense & years of training, to deliver shock & awe.
As far as I know there is no difference (except for local or personal preferences in the precise style & size) between a machete & what I always knew as a cutlass – a kind of all-purpose tool, used particularly for cutting sugar cane, but also just in your own garden. Low cost, low tech, efficient. Just use one to slice the top off a (green) coconut for access to natures own rehydration therapy. Or buy delicious sugar juice from the street cane seller.
The word machete is from Spanish & has been in use since at least Elizabethan times. The earliest reference found by the OED (which gives, as the definition: A broad, heavy knife or cutlass used as an implement or as a weapon, originating in Central America and the Caribbean) is in Hakluyt: “doozen of machetos to minch the Whale.”
It has an interesting history of pronunciation in English: a Frenchified machette to begin with, but today’s 3 syllables became standard in both British & American usage by the late C20th
Cutlass is related to the French word for knife – couteau. The OED remarks, a bit sniffily, that “The original coutel-as, coutel-ace, has undergone many perversions in English under the influence of popular etymology, which has transformed the first part into cuttle, curtal, curtle, curt, cut, and the second into ax, axe.” It has been thought of as an implement for thrusting, rather than cutting, & used to be particularly associated with sailors; Victorian police forces were also armed with cutlasses for riot control, though they tended to stay rusting in the armouries.
Since my current beef is with the press, I thought I would look back at Times Archive Online Newspaper Archive of The Times from 1785-1985 to see how the words used to be used.
I found 1,947 results for cutlass but only 465 for machete. Interestingly, in both cases, the largest number of the references came from advertisements – 1,203 cutlasses & 214 machetes. The very earliest reference to either is a front page advertisement in The Times of 1792.
Things are the other way round on the modern website Times Online News and Views from The Times and Sunday Times, which comes right up to date. Machete produced 420 results in the last quarter of a century - almost as many as it did in the two whole previous ones. Cutlass puts in a mere 89 appearances.
