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cut throat
DCHP-1 (pre-1967)
Spelling variants:cut-throat
Entry from the DCHP-1 (pre-1967)
This entry may contain outdated or offensive information, terms, and examples.
1n.
in preparing fish for salting, the person who guts the fish and all but severs its head, making it ready to be snapped off by the header.
Quotations
1818
Each salting-house is provided with one or more tables, around which are placed wooden chairs and leathern aprons, for the cut-throats, headers, and splitters.
1861
The first person on the stage engaged in curing fish is the "cut-throat," with his double-edged knife; the next is the "header," who dislocates the neck, and forces the head of the fish off, which falls into the water through a hole cut in the table.
1965
The man nearest the box, the "cut-throat," reaches down, grasps a fish and holding by a finger in each eye . . . he makes a lightning-quick cut across the throat from gill to gill and then a second longitudinal cut, ripping down the belly and allowing the entrails to spill out. He then pushes the fish over to the "header."
2n.
a large trout of western Canada, Salmo clarkii, so called from a red streak under each side of the lower jaw.
See: cutthroat trout
Quotations
1907
The cut-throat is unknown to me. I have never caught it in British Columbian waters, unless some fish mentioned later in the accounts of the Nicola River belong to this species.
1963
The cutthroats could start feeding on the first hatches of pink salmon fry in the sloughs and lower reaches of the rivers.