red tape

Example: “Opening the clinic took two years of red tape.”

Origin: Refers to the real historical practice of binding official government documents with reddish cloth tape or ribbon, a custom some sources trace back as far as the 11th century among English clerks. A popular but less certain story credits the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the 1500s with specifically using red tape to set apart his most urgent paperwork from routine documents tied in plain string. Red dye was genuinely more expensive to produce than other common colors during much of this period, which may have made it a natural, hard-to-imitate choice for marking official or especially important papers. The figurative sense — needless, obstructive bureaucratic procedure — is documented from 1796, well before the fully metaphorical use recorded in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1838 novel Alice, or the Mysteries. "Cutting through the red tape," for bypassing excessive procedure, followed naturally from the literal act of cutting the tape itself to actually open a bound document.