cut corners

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cut corners (third-person singular simple present cuts corners, present participle cutting corners, simple past and past participle cut corners)

1. To bypass a prescribed route so as to gain competitive advantage or to circumvent traffic signals or other rules of the road.
   • 1882, Dan Seffert, quoted in “Half Hours with Dan Seffert”, in Baily's Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, Volume 39, page 275:

     […] but I believe the old man did not ride fair, as he cut corners and joined in with them again […]

2. (idiomatic) To do a less-than-thorough or incomplete job; to do something poorly; to take inappropriate shortcuts.

   Synonyms: skimp, take short cuts, follow the path of least resistance, take the easy way out, (slang) half-ass

   The guy who built the fence cut corners when sinking the posts, and the fence fell over in the last storm.

   Do you know why Wendy's has square burgers? Because they don't cut corners.

   • 2024 April 6, Cade Metz, Cecilia Kang, Sheera Frenkel, Stuart A. Thompson, Nico Grant, “How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I.”, in The New York Times‎^[1], →ISSN, archived from the original on 7 April 2024:

     To obtain that data, tech companies including OpenAI, Google and Meta have cut corners, ignored corporate policies and debated bending the law, according to an examination by The New York Times.

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