Meaning & Analysis
To cut an already tiny cherry into two portions; i.e., to divide something minuscule with fussy thrift.
Insights
Miserly thrift
It ridicules extreme parsimony—measuring and dividing trifles with pedantic care rather than showing ordinary liberality.
Performative austerity
Publicly parsimonious gestures pose as virtue, while the same person may indulge in private—thrift as moral theater rather than real restraint.
Mean apportionment
In wages, rations, or gifts, the spirit is to split shares to vanishing thinness, preserving the giver’s surplus while others go short.
Stinginess of speech
By extension, it can mark a close, monosyllabic talker—one who doles out words as niggardly as morsels.
Small-minded exactness
An obsession with trimming tiny costs or fractions eclipses proportion and generosity, turning prudence into pettiness.
Cherry scale
A cherry is miniature; proposing two ‘bits’ of it is comically mean, so the image indicts covetousness through disproportional division.
Hypocrisy called out
Torriano’s gloss paints the ‘demure’ who will split one cherry in public yet ‘devour a pound’ in private—an early modern snapshot of virtue-signaling thrift that masks appetite.
Word-stinginess
Motteux’s line about getting only monosyllables—he’d ‘make three bits of a cherry’—extends the trope to speech, where minimal utterance showcases a cramped, withholding temper.
Proverbial cluster
It pairs with the sharper hyperbole ‘nineteen bits of a bilberry,’ amplifying the satire on misers by choosing ever-smaller fruits and ever-finer slicing.
Diachronic drift
Later idiom ‘two bites of the cherry’ came to mean ‘two chances,’ but the older sense here is not advantage-seeking so much as mean division and ostentatious thrift.
Rhetorical Devices
Hyperbole
Dividing a cherry dramatizes excess thrift through an absurdly tiny unit, making the vice laughably visible.
Concrete imagery
The tactile act of cutting fruit carries the moral home: readers can see and feel the meagerness.
Synecdoche
‘Cherry’ stands for resources in general; ‘bit’ for any allotted share, broadening the scope beyond food.
Numerical pointedness
The fixed ‘two’ (and variants like ‘three’) gives the gibe a quotable hook and underscores fussy calculation.
Elliptic phrasing
Bare infinitive construction (‘To make…’) sounds like a rule-of-thumb, compressing a social judgment into a compact tag.
Transcription
Quotations
To play the Hypocrite, and be demure, one that will make two bits of one Chery, but in private can devour a pound and more.
Nothing is to be got out of him but monosyllables: by Jingo, I believe he wou'd make three bits of a Cherry.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
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