Cutting to standard usage

[wwidsith]

I feel like I might have posted about this before, but I just read another example and it made me jump. So, here are a few sentences to read:

Her camera hews so closely to his world view that you become fully immersed in his sadness. - The New Yorker

She struck me as someone who had hewed to the line of her own ambition without sacrificing crucial

Comments

[weofodthignen]

This is one of those things where I have inferred the meaning and just assumed it was correct. I read it as "follow," like "toe the line," not "stick to" like "cleave to," and so the first example seems a bit overreaching.

Rummaging around a bit online, I see this widely copied source derives it specifically from "hew to the line" meaning "cut evenly with an axe or saw," first recorded 1891. . . . and searching for "hew to" in Words and phrases index: a guide to antedatings, new words, new ..., Volume 4 By C. Edward Wall, Edward Przebienda via a Google Books search, I find a tantalizing reference to 1946 but that about finished my eyes. Neither of those told me whether it's specifically American, but it doesn't seem to be based on an error like the now well established "tow the line."

M

[wwidsith]

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks!

[norabird]

How interesting! This usage of 'hew' is completely, entirely normal to me. I suppose that as an action verb--hewing firewood, hewing logs, somesuch thing--I do see that it also means to sever or separate, in the way of cleave. Except cleave used here would be wrong, in the US; it has a very overt sexual or romantic connotation, I would say, so that you couldn't sub it into your example sentences. One cleaves to things loved; one hews to principles or ideas. You can think of it as being less a confusion of hew with cleave--which I don't think it is, actually--and more a sense of cutting closely to something, or cutting your life into a certain shape; Kennedy in an almost physical way, then, *shaped* his life, and shaped it by following certain values, as if he was running his scissors along the dotted line. you can't follow it exactly, being human; but you can roughly chop along near the outline, if you have a will to.

[norabird]

ah, and someone beat me to it, only with, you know, references.