cut down to size
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English
[edit]Alternative forms
[edit]Verb
[edit]cut down to size (third-person singular simple present cuts down to size, present participle cutting down to size, simple past and past participle cut down to size)
- To humble or humiliate, especially someone or something that is perceived as overly domineering or too proud.
- 2000, Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The "new Historians", page 152:
- The war was seen by the Foreign Office as a golden opportunity to undo the UN Partition Resolution and cut Israel down to size'.
- 2003, Gordon Donnell, Starliner, page 10:
- The system cut everybody down to size. I felt small and vulnerable.
- 2015, Anita Anand, Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, page 87:
- If Arthur Oliphant's aim had been to cut them down to size, it worked: photographs taken at Somerville College in 1888 show Bamba and her sister looking diffident.
- Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see cut, down, size.
- 1995, Sidney Winter, Small and Medium-size Enterprises in Economic Development:
- There is, however, another general approach to cutting the potential client population down to size: establish criteria, grounded in the Bank's basic strategy, that restrict the range of enterprises that the Bank tries to reach.
- 2007, Vannessa Goodship, Introduction to Plastics Recycling, page 55:
- As the plastic moves between the stationary and rotating blades it is cut down to size.