go native
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.67 in modern English
12
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
3
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To adopt the lifestyle or outlook of local inhabitants, especially when dwelling in a colonial region.
verb
Of a contractor or consultant, to begin working directly as an employee for a company and cease to work through a contracting firm or agency.
Example Sentences
- "[…]for St. Xavier's looks down on boys who ‘go native all-together.’ One must never forget that one is a Sahib, and that some day, when examinations are passed, one will command natives."
- "He was an extraordinary figure, with his red beard and matted hair, and his great hairy chest. His feet were horny and scarred, so that I knew he went always bare foot. He had gone native with a vengeance."
- "Yet while Gauguin went native, taking teenage mistresses, wearing local costumes and building his own wooden hut, his ultimate purpose was to impress the art world back home."
- "In the case of diplomats, the State Department has had to wrestle with criticisms that regional specialists—say, those who concentrate on the Arab world and speak Arabic—will suffer from “clientitis”: the disease of “going native,” of developing such sympathy for the people and culture of a given region that one begins to represent its interest to America rather than vice versa."
- "Although I have tried to avoid bias, I may have failed. For example, I may have "gone native," a visitor seduced by the charms of a new exotic world."
- "[…] we had to stop putting job-hunting colonels in charge of AFPRO detachments in the plants. It almost always happened that they went native and began to represent the contractor rather than the government."