procrustean bed

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English

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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.

Noun

procrustean bed (plural procrustean beds)

  1. An arbitrary standard, especially one that is forced upon people for the sake of conformity and involves the sacrifice of what is useful.
    • 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.
    • 1848, Elizabeth Gaskell, chapter 15, in Mary Barton‎, volume 1, London: Chapman and Hall, page 271:
      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.
    • 1901 [1887], Robert Louis Stevenson, chapter IV, in Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin‎, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons:
      Iron-bound, impersonal ethics, the procrustean bed of rules, he soon saw at their true value as the deification of averages.
    • 1947, Felix Frankfurter, New York v. United States, 331 U.S. 284, 353 (dissenting):
      The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality.
    • 1959, Aldous Huxley, “The Ego”, in Pierro Ferrucci, editor, The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959‎, New York: Harper & Row, published 1977, page 146:
      […] 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.
    • 2022, China Miéville, chapter 3, in A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, →OCLC:
      […] 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.

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