“Cutting edge” actually preceded “leading edge,” first appearing in a literal sense (the sharp edge of a knife or other cutting implement) in the early 19th century. “Cutting-edge” and “leading-edge” are most often used in the context of technology (computers, cell phones, flying cars, etc.), and only rarely do we read of “cutting edge quilts” or “leading-edge pot roast recipes.” “Cutting-edge” and “leading-edge” are both adjectives used (especially in product promotional materials and corporate “mission statements”) to mean “At the forefront or most advanced stage of development highly innovative or pioneering.” Both are also used as nouns (without the hyphens) to mean that highly-advanced state of awesomeness (“Professors, commonly assumed to be on the leading edge of thought…” Fortune, 1983). But instead I whiled away my nights with Radio Moscow and learned that cats are hopelessly bourgeois and therefore unreliable allies of the proletariat.
I’m pretty sure I could have discovered things they didn’t want me to know. I got a Hallicrafters shortwave radio instead, which was very cool, but I never got to hook up the cats to the scope like I had planned. I was fascinated by electronics as a child, and wanted an oscilloscope for my birthday when I was twelve. Oh goody, an electronics engineering question, sort of. Is there any evidence that “leading-edge” came before “cutting-edge”? - William Blum. So my hypothesis is that somewhere along the line, the “leading-edge” morphed into “cutting-edge,” which probably sounds better to people who do not think about square waves a lot. To me, “cutting-edge” doesn’t mean much except to the knife-sharpener manufacturers of the world. Of course, the leading edge always gets there first. The analogy was to a square-wave voltage signal in which each pulse has a leading edge and a trailing edge. Oooh it’s shiny and white and it has rounded corners and who cares what it does?ĭear Word Detective: I was just reading about yet another “suite of products supported by cutting-edge technologies that insure….” A few years back I was studying electronics in college, and in those days we called them “leading-edge” technologies.
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