narrow-gutted

English

Adjective

narrow-gutted (comparative more narrow-gutted, superlative most narrow-gutted)

1. (boat-building) Narrow in the beam; Not as wide as is conventional for a vessel of comparable length.
   • 1976 January, Rolf Eliasson, “Dory Schooner”, in Cruising World, volume 2, number 1, page 71:

     In this case Rolf Eliasson has opted for length, although an 8'5" beam isn't excessively narrow-gutted on a 25'7” LWL.

   • 2011, Nick Ardley, The Jottings of a Thames Estuary Ditch-Crawler:

     She was a narrow-gutted, finely shaped thing (a narrow beam for her length, and typical of the period). She was once a beautiful vessel and would have enhanced any waterfront of the period – 'Even now' the skipper had mused, looking at her with just a little affection.

   • 2015, Peter A. Robson, Raincoast Chronicles 23:

     It looked like a typical gyppo logging camp boat, a sad-looking thirty-two-foot hulk on its last stop before the boneyard. It was a long, narrow-gutted, low-slung thing.

2. Having a thin abdomen, especially when sickly or hungry.
   • 1840, How to Buy a Horse, page 190:

     A round-barrelled, trussy horse of a hardy constitution will bear a dose of medicine which would be destruction to a slight and narrow-gutted one, and you should therefore be extremely cautious how you administer such quantities as you may occasionally see prescribed as physic in veterinary works, without previously ascertaining, as far as you can, the capabilities of your horse for sustaining their operation.

   • 1911, Merritt Wesley Harper, Manual of Farm Animals, page 29:

     By changing the food one can increase or diminish the size of the abdomen: thus by feeding food containing much bulk, the shape of the narrow-gutted horse is modified; by feeding concentrated foods, such as oats, the cow-belly can be made to disappear.

   • 1990, Maurice Shadbolt, Season of the Jew: A Novel, page 43:

     An awkward and angular fellow, narrow-gutted, with wiry beard and bony face.

   • 2009, Peter Sutton, The Politics of Suffering, page 21:

     Inland from Aurukun, the lantern-jawed, rangy, narrow-gutted Coen police sergeant, Jim Scanlon, let us know he had been told to report our whereabouts in the Cape to the authorities in Brisbane.

   • 2015, Gregory Day, Archipelago of Souls:

     A whippet's bow to his back in the tight hunch where he sat, narrow-gutted from recent deprivations, a long Riverina face.

3. Thin; narrow.
   • 1910, New Zealand. Parliament, Parliamentary Debates: House of Representatives, page 62:

     It is a narrow-gutted piece of country, any way: there are only about thirty miles dividing the east coast from the west coast at certain points, and the Kaipara Harbour and Wairoa River will always be deadly competitors with any line of railway constructed between Whangarei and Dargaville.

   • 1927, James Murray Allison, “Percy Sheppard's Narrow Shave”, in It Never Rains: And Other Stories, page 51:

     In one of the main streets of the city of Glasgow there reaches to the sky as loftily as the local municipal laws allow, a narrow-gutted building of red stone.

   • 2009, Farley Mowat, Bay of Spirits, page 123:

     This was a narrow-gutted twister several miles long and no place for the faint-hearted, especially when wind and tide were fighting as they were this day.

4. Cheap and/or minimal.
   • 1812 March, “Cambridge Auxiliary Bible Society, and the speeches which proclaimed its birth”, in The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, volume 41, number 165, page 316:

     I thought, however, that Dr. Clarke made it appear, as plain as the nose in your face, that the great scholar who was absent was the enemy of Christendom; that such Popish notions as his ought not to be tolerated; and that, in short, the sooner he gave up his professorship the better, if he had arrived at these years, and did not know what true, sound, round-about Christianity was; that it embraced all people, nations, and languages, upon the face of the earth; and, scorning the little paltry, narrow-gutted gate belonging to the priests, bolted, like a giant, plump out of the spacious portals of the temple at once; that this was your "pure religion, and undefiled;" and that for the Bible to take a travelling companion, by way of corrective, was mere Gallimatia, and a disgrace to common sense.

   • 1993, Morris S. Arnold, Colonial Arkansas, 1686-1804: A Social and Cultural History, page xiv:

     Though this book has scholarly pretensions in the sense that it is solidly grounded in far-flung archival materials, my aim has been to produce a work for the educated general reader, not a narrow-gutted monograph.

   • 1995, Nicholas J. Goetzfridt, Indigenous Literature of Oceania, page 186:

     Keri Hulme's brief and more "oblique" review of Wedde's and McQueen's anthology (pp. 301-305) expresses appreciation for the offering of a translation of Maori poetry("a prosaic rendition of silent words") in the anthology and its range of poetry which makes this an authoritative anthology of "so much richness, fatness, sheer power in it, that, beside it, all the former anthologies look narrow-gutted and mean."

   • 2019, Max Hennessy, The Challenging Heights:

     The aircraft began to take off in the middle of the afternoon, for various points along the fault where the wrecked villages lay; Dicken's assignment was Jehuddin, a narrow-gutted little town under the hills.

   • 2020, Mark Hebden, Pel and the Pirates:

     In addition, the private beach which had been advertised turned out to be a narrow-gutted oil-covered inlet into the cliffs filled with small boulders on which it would be quite impossible to lie or even sit down in the sun, and, as Oek gad discovered while searching round the place for any signs of who it was who had killed Caceolari, it could only be reached by a hair-raising climb down a narrow path overhanging the cliff.

5. Overly frugal; stingy.
   • 1862 January 1, H. N., “The Builders' Harvest Time”, in The Operative Bricklayers' Society's Trade Circular and General Reporter, volume 1, number 5, page 47:

     They replied trade we should not take notice of the that their narrow-gutted employer would not allow them to make more than eight hours per day, because because he always charged full time for them to his customers, which they could prove.

   • 1928, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, chapter XV, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, authorized British edition, London: Martin Secker […], published February 1932 (May 1932 printing), →OCLC:

     'No,' said he. 'He didn't bother. He just disliked them. There's a difference. Because, as he said, the Tommies are getting just as priggish and half-balled and narrow-gutted. It's the fate of mankind, to go that way.'

   • 1948, Horace Alan Dunn, Laughing His Way to a Million: A True Story, page 134:

     And there's no use of me denyin ' the fact that the country hereabouts is uninvitin ' for a boy deservin ' of somethin ' better'n the narrow-gutted existence that folks are obliged to live in these parts.

   • 2012, John Harris, Smiling Willie And The Tiger:

     Pansy didn't think much of the inky-fingered young men with spectacles who slaved over the desks at the railway station, and in the warehouses or the various narrow-gutted diamond buyers' offices.

   • 2013, Desmond Bagley, The Spoilers / Juggernaut:

     He was tired of fighting the stupidity of the public, of which the queasiness of this narrow-gutted landlord was only a single example.

6. Small-minded; conventional and unadventurous;
   • 2003, Robin Holloway, On Music: Essays and Diversions 1963-2003, page 380:

     But nothing is accidental in Final Alice: the jokes are all so musical and composed with such mastery as to silence narrow-querulousness about content.

   • 2011, Laura Jackson, Brian Jones:

     Brian was deeply insulted, not only by the tenor of the attack, but also by the narrow-gutted assumption that hair longer than conventional must be dirty.

   • 2012, Philip Larkin, Anthony Thwaite, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica:

     I suppose I haven't the breadth of temperament to appreciate the faults of genius: just a narrow-gutted bourgeois, I suppose.

   • 2014, Paul Bentley, Ted Hughes, Class and Violence, page 47:

     “And you're too narrow-gutted ever to get into trouble,” Arthur responded'; 'They can spy on us all day to see if we're pulling our puddings and if we're working good or doing our “athletics” but they can't make an X-ray of our guts to find out what we're telling ourselves.'