show who's boss
English
Alternative forms
- show who's the boss
Pronunciation
Audio (AU) (file)
Verb
show who's boss (third-person singular simple present shows who's boss, present participle showing who's boss, simple past showed who's boss, past participle shown who's boss)
- (intransitive, idiomatic) To demonstrate oneself to be dominant; to show that one has the upper hand.
- 1975, Dorothy Corkille Briggs, Your Child's Self-esteem: The Key to Life, →ISBN, page 234:
- When children are young, spanking is a familiar device to show who's boss.
- 1989 June 24, Alan Cowell, "Coping With Curfew in Gaza," New York Times (retrieved 11 June 2015):
- Israeli soldiers . . . impose the curfews as collective punishment or as a means to head off violent protest, or simply to show who's boss.
- 2015 Feb. 12, Anna Lysyanskaya, "Want better data privacy? Demand it," Providence Journal (retrieved 11 June 2015):
- So tomorrow a patriotic Russian hacker might just start breaking into private email servers of American companies and releasing their contents, just to show who’s boss.
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- (transitive, idiomatic) To demonstrate that one is dominant over or superior to someone; to establish that one has control of some device or intractable object.
- 1916, B. M. Bower, The Heritage of the Sioux, ch. 21:
- "Bimeby I show yoh who's boss. I make yoh cry for Ramon be good to yoh!"
- 1995 March 14, Russell Baker, "Fat Is Easier," New York Times (retrieved 11 June 2015):
- A typewriter once put me in such evil temper that I threw it out a second-floor window. . . . Replacing it cost $100 or so—a small price to pay for the pleasure of showing a machine who's boss.
- 2009 July 25, Lawrence O'Donnell Jr, "The Stupidity of the Gates Arrest," Time (retrieved 11 June 2015):
- [H]e decided to show Gates who's boss the only way he knew how—by whipping out his handcuffs and abusing his power to arrest.
- 1916, B. M. Bower, The Heritage of the Sioux, ch. 21:
See also
- teach someone a lesson
- like one owns the place
Further reading
- show who's boss at OneLook Dictionary Search
- show someone who's boss at OneLook Dictionary Search