I always thought it did/should mean that the work was gonna be easy since it was cut *out* but apparently it means the work is gonna be hard and I don’t understand how it makes sense
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There’s a whole history here – https://wordhistories.net/2017/12/18/work-cut-out-origin/
It actually apparently started out pretty neutral, like, you had your work set up and you had to do it. Wasn’t easy or hard work, just work. Then it started changing in meaning, to doing all the work you could take on. Then… yeah. Just kept changing.
A lot of people say it comes from tailors in the 1600s, where they would cut out pieces of fabric before getting to work on the real deal, but it seems like the original uses of the idiom never actually had a real connection to tailoring.
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