Did you mean Procrustean?
Definitions
Wiktionary
- adj. Producing or designed to produce strict conformity by ruthless or arbitrary means.
- adj. Marked by arbitrary often ruthless disregard of individual differences or special circumstances.
Etymologies
- After Procrustes, a mythical Greek giant who stretched or shortened captives to make them fit his beds, from Latin Procrustēs, from Greek Prokroustēs, from prokrouein, hammer out, to stretch out : pro-, forth; see pro-2 + krouein, to beat.
Examples
“Darkman - I object to your procrustean analysis re: obscure words not being a sign of cleverness, if not wit.”
““Of what, I did not know” is a stock procrustean device to fill out the stanza.”
Taste Tests, Thomas Hardy, Peter Van Toorn and consistent reception
“Not so wise is the agency gazing into a technological crystal ball and trying to force innovation to conform to its procrustean vision.”
“Once the bridge was negotiated, I saw the slow rise of a hill, carefully manicured on both sides of a narrow walkway with procrustean green fields, dotted in places by crabapple trees that attracted fleets of frenzied wasps when the season fermented in sick sweetness, falling fruit mashed muted viridian in streaks and lopsided buttons across the sidewalk.”
“Experience shows us that visual SF is a procrustean genre and source material that does not fit its needs will be altered until it does.”
MIND MELD: What Makes a Successful SciFi/Fantasy Book Adaptation? Why Do Some Fail?
“By melding various aesthetics in a quest for objectivity that ends up being more procrustean than coherent, the editors produce lists that feel, to me at least, almost random.”
“Obviously it cannot be made to fit the procrustean bed he has made.”
“Such procrustean bed reasoning is why so many individuals had to be sacrificed to the zeitgeist.”
Hours Worked in Europe vs. the U.S., Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
“And so, I submit to you that I'm the one who accepts the Bible's own authority, which demands of me that I not squeeze it into a procrustean bed or ride roughshod over its diversity.”
“Again you are running with the procrustean argument - because so many state schools are poor, delenda est Eton.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘procrustean’.
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Words starting with PRO
I've noticed many, many words start with PRO and this is just a collection of them.
professional, pronunciation, Prolagus, probable, prog, proximity, profit, procrastincate, prom, pronoun, promise, proactive and 206 more...
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Quashmonger's Word-O-Rama
defenestration, procrustean, schadenfreude, philtrum, earworm, mondegreen, corpulent, miasma, preantepenultimate, déjà visité, jamais vu
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rare words that might be useful
transmogrify, fastidiousness, interiority, indecorous, procrustean, vociferous, descry, solecism, apogee, progeny, envisage, anteroom and 3 more...
tankexmortis For others who were curious about the method of torture referred to: "Procrustes (the stretcher), also known as Damastes (subduer) and Polypemon (harming much), is a figure from Greek mythology. He was a bandit from Attica, with a stronghold in the hills outside Eleusis. There, he had an iron bed into which he invited every passerby to lie down. If the guest proved too tall, he would amputate the excess length; victims who were too short were stretched on the rack until they were long enough. Nobody ever fit in the bed because it was secretly adjustable: Procrustes would stretch or shrink it upon sizing his victims from afar."
From Wikipedia, naturally. Aug 7, 2008