cubbyhole
verbEtymology From cubby + hole.
1
To restrict, limit or narrowly define; to pigeonhole.
- Rivera: The world has changed. It is no longer cubbyholed. I do not think — Friendly: What do you mean cubbyholed? Rivera: I do not think the definition of journalist is as narrowly construed these days as perhaps it was once.1989, ASNE: Proceedings of the 1989 Convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, page 13:
- A true Renaissance man, Walcott has consistently resisted being cubbyholed. He has rejected neither his Caribbean heritage nor his British education.1994, Rita Dove, ““Either I’m Noboby, or I’m a Nation””, in Herbert A. Leibowitz, editor, Parnassus: Twenty Years of Poetry in Review, The University of Michigan Press, →ISBN, page 244:
4 more examples
- The Americans wanted to have enclosed offices, or at the very least, shoulder-high partitions cubbyholing individual desks.2006, J. J. Fucini, S. Fucini, “A Third-Culture Plant”, in Ed Rhodes, James P. Warren, Ruth Carter, editors, Supply Chains and Total Product Systems: A Reader, The Open University; Blackwell Publishing, page 289:
- And, if we do so, it would be useful to bear in mind Sloterdijk’s insights regarding the amphibian quality of discourse within the Weimar Republic and the compelling ways in which it eludes easy generalization and comfortable cubbyholing.2011, Eric Rentschler, “Rudolf Arnheim’s Early Passage Between Social and Aesthetic Film Criticism”, in Scott Higgins, editor, Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, Routledge, pages 62–63:
- Delimited files and spreadsheets compartmentalize data by separating each piece of info with a comma or a tab, or by cubbyholing them into columns and rows in a spreadsheet file.2013, Bonnie Biafore, QuickBooks 2014: The Missing Manual, O’Reilly:
- In the current era, there is too much demand for customer service and the restrains on budgets too great for you to allow cubbyholing.[…]And finally, out of necessity, a small organization like ours, with an increasing workload, could not afford to cubbyhole anyone, let alone 10 percent of our workforce. I advised my directors of my expectation that everybody had to work, that there was to be no cubbyholing, and that there would be no exceptions.2015, Vince Meconi, A Practical Guide to Government Management, Bernan Press, The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., →ISBN, pages 83 and 89: