The panel on this week's The News Quiz, a comedy panel game on BBC Radio 4, were talking about 'swingeing cuts'. Someone asked whether anything else other than cuts could be swingeing, and the host Sandi Toksvig asked whether it was possible to swinge.
The answers are 'yes' and 'yes'. I put 'swingeing' into the search box on the Google news page and certainly it is true that 'swingeing' nearly always accompanies the words 'cuts', but I also saw the phrases 'swingeing rates applied to credit cards', 'swingeing council job losses' and 'swingeing tax rises'. Swingeing is from the verb 'to swinge', which is now virtually obsolete and means, or meant, 'to whip or flog'. The present participle swingeing, used as an adjective, is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as colloquial or slang and has the definition: "Very forcible, great, or large; huge, immense." The verb 'swinge' dates back to Old English and is related to the word 'swing'.
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