Meaning
A person brought in to do an employer's unpleasant work - the firing of colleagues, the cutting of budgets, the character assassination of a rival - so that the employer's own hands stay clean. In journalism it also means a writer who specializes in savage attacks, and the phrase is nearly always an accusation rather than a job title anyone claims. Strongly disapproving; applying it to someone is itself an attack on their employer's cleanliness. The related hatchet job names the attack itself. Regional use: General English; American origin.
Origin
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, English-language newspapers used hatchet man for a Chinese assassin who carried a hatchet, a figure of New York's Doyers Street and the tong wars reported from Chinatowns. The label then slid from the literal killer to the figurative one: a trusted, orthodox subordinate assigned to destroy an opponent by any means necessary. The Watergate era fixed the modern sense - Time magazine called Chuck Colson 'top hatchet man and tireless inventor of dirty tricks' among President Nixon's men in 1976 - and business borrowed it for whoever wields the layoff axe. Cambridge now records three shades: the general one who does unpleasant or violent jobs, the business cost-cutter or bearer of dismissal notices, and the attacking writer.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- hatchet men
- hatchet woman
- someone's hatchet man
Usage Examples
- The board hired a well-known hatchet man to cut thirty percent of the workforce before the sale completed.
- Columnists cast the attorney general as the president's hatchet man, dispatched to ruin the regulator's reputation.
- As the company's hatchet woman, she had told four hundred people they were redundant by the end of March.