procrustean bed
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.20 in modern English
21
Scrabble Score
14
Letters
2
Syllables
12
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
An arbitrary standard, especially one that is forced upon people for the sake of conformity and involves the sacrifice of what is useful.
noun
Alternative letter-case form of procrustean bed.
noun
Alternative letter-case form of procrustean bed.
Example Sentences
- "1787, Anna Seward, letter to Francis Noel Clarke Mundy dated 10 October, 1787, in Letters of Anna Seward, Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1811, Volume 1, p. 342, Merely to jingle common-place ideas in rhyme, may be easy enough; but to make fine sense, animated and appropriate description, and beautiful imagery, recline gracefully on that Procrustean bed, is about as easy as to compose music like Handel or Hedyen, and to paint like Reynolds, Romney, and Fuzeli."
- "And now began the real wrong-doing of the Trades’ Unions. As to their decision to work, or not, at such a particular rate of wages, that was either wise or unwise; all error of judgment at the worst. But they had no right to tyrannise over others, and tie them down to their own procrustean bed."
- "Iron-bound, impersonal ethics, the procrustean bed of rules, he soon saw at their true value as the deification of averages."
- "The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality."
- "[…] we shouldn’t try to mould or squeeze people into the procrustean bed of our popular conception of human virtue of the moment, but permit them as far as possible to develop along their own temperamental lines."
- "[…] but, as the authors had hinted in their discussion of Germany in the Manifesto, that such a conception is not a procrustean bed into which complex reality must be shoved."
Etymology
From the Greek myth about Procrustes, who assaulted people to make their body height conform to the length of a particular iron bed; see details at Wikipedia.