Meaning
To solve a hopelessly tangled problem by one bold, unconventional stroke rather than patient untangling - accepting rough justice in place of elegant procedure. The phrase approves decisiveness where analysis has failed. Approving of nerve, but note the taint of the shortcut - the phrase can bless high-handedness as easily as genius. The linchpin variant is the historians' favourite wrinkle. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
At Gordium in Phrygia an ox-cart was tied to a pole with a knot of cornel bark so entangled, in Curtius Rufus's description, that it was impossible to see how it was fastened; an oracle held that whoever loosed it would rule Asia. Alexander, arriving in 333 BC, struggled, then concluded that how it was loosened made no difference - and cut it, in the popular version; Plutarch and Arrian, citing Aristobulus, say he pulled the linchpin from the pole and untied it, which some scholars find the more plausible story. He went on to conquer Asia as far as the Indus. English took up the image early and kept it: Shakespeare's Henry V (1599) has 'The Gordian knot of it he will unloose', Jefferson wrote in 1785 that a knot you thought Gordian will untie itself, Hazlitt credited Horne Tooke with loosening the Gordian knot of grammarians in 1825, and Greenwood's 1881 cut the Gordian knot of a publican's disagreement. Wiktionary's gloss is the standard: an intricate problem with a simple, decisive solution.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- cut through the Gordian knot
- the Gordian knot
- untie the Gordian knot
Usage Examples
- After years of negotiation, the minister cut the Gordian knot by nationalizing the ferry line.
- Faced with forty years of conflicting leases, the new owner cut the Gordian knot: everyone got a fresh contract.
- The schema migration was a Gordian knot until one engineer dropped the legacy tables outright.