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“Moving along at a decent clip” by sadd3j

So this one has been bugging me for more than a few weeks now, and I’ve asked Sam a couple of times, why it is we say “move along at a decent clip”. What does it mean? What’s a decent clip? What is a clip?!@ The first thing that comes to mind is the fast ship from the 1800s called the “clipper”, so I always felt that this version of the noun “clip” had a kind of nautical nature to it. It turns out I wasn’t too far off the mark.

For myself, “moving along at a clip” evokes a kind of.. smooth, continuous rapid movement imagery in my head, like a ship cutting through the water or a galloping horse. The other common “clip” nouns include the attaching kind (paper clip) and the movie kind (movie clip). It also used to describe a hug, a blow (like a punch) and a number of other things, but now we’re getting off topic.

A few weeks ago, an initial search for “moving along at a decent clip, phrase, origin” in google turned up nothing, and I promptly gave up. Today I decided to try again, and this time was a bit smarter and looked up the definition of the word. The first few definitions just said that it was slang and informal, but eventually I found this, which gave a bit more clue to it’s origin:

clip (1)
“cut,” c.1200, from O.N. klippa, probably echoic. Meaning “rate of speed is c.1867. Noun meaning “extract from a movie” is from 1958.

I wasn’t sure what O.N. stood for, but after moving from dictionaries to etymology I found that clip came from:

Middle English clippen, from Old Norse klippa.

Ah ha! O.N. Old Norse! I originally looked for it in latin, greek and swedish (since Klippa sounds like somethign from IKEA) but now I was onto something. Eventually I stumbled onto www.word-detective.com and a post back in 2006 which says:

The other kind of “clip,” meaning “to cut,” appeared in English around 1200, derived from the Old Norse “klippa,” probably an echoic formation (meaning that the word imitated the sharp, sudden sound of something “clipping”). This “clip” developed a variety of derivative meanings, including “to form or mark by clipping” (as hedges are clipped), “to cut short or diminish” (as budgets are “clipped”), to cheat or swindle, and, in the 19th century, “to move or run quickly” (giving us, in noun form, “at a good clip” as well as swift “clipper” ships). This use evidently derives from the notion of “cutting short” the time taken. One of the more recently developed senses of “clip” is “an extract from a motion picture,” which appeared around 1958.

I also found out the below, that the ship was named after the horse, which comes from clippen, meaning to “shorten” which in turn may have been influenced from the Middle Dutch word klepper.

c.1330, from clippen “shorten,” perhaps infl. by M.Du. klepper “swift horse,” echoic. The type of fast sailing ship so called from 1830, from clip (1) in alternate sense of “to move or run rapidly.

Suffice to say, the origin is something along the lines of the time taken to travel has been cut / clipped short and somehow been transformed into a noun along the way.

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