cut corners

present singular third person cuts corners · participle present cutting corners

1. To bypass a prescribed route so as to gain competitive advantage or to circumvent traffic signals or other rules of the road.

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

   1882, Dan Seffert, quoted in “Half Hours with Dan Seffert”, in Baily's Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, Volume 39, page 275

2. idiomaticTo do a less-than-thorough or incomplete job; to do something poorly; to take inappropriate shortcuts.

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

   2 more examples

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

   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.

   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, →ISSN, archived from the original on 07 Apr 2024

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