go native
English
Pronunciation
Audio (AU) (file)
Verb
go native (third-person singular simple present goes native, present participle going native, simple past went native, past participle gone native)
- (idiomatic) To adopt the lifestyle or outlook of local inhabitants, especially when dwelling in a colonial region.
- 1901, Rudyard Kipling, chapter 7, in Kim:
- 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.
- 1919, W. Somerset Maugham, chapter 53, in Moon and Sixpence:
- 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.
- 2003, Alan Riding, "The Colors of Paradise As Imagined by Gauguin," New York Times, 14 Oct. (retrieved 27 Dec. 2008),
- 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.
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- (idiomatic) 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.
- 1989, Arthur Ernest Fitzgerald, The Pentagonists, page 204:
- […] 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.
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See also
- clientitis
References
- go native at OneLook Dictionary Search