to cut off your nose to spite your face
1
9.8
- idiom
- Informal
:
hacerse daño a uno mismo
- By quitting his job in protest, he realized he was just cutting off his nose to spite his face.
Examples
-
If you refuse to work with her just because you're angry, you'll be cutting off your nose to spite your face.
-
Nobody's going to cut off their nose to spite their face, naming names in this...
-
You cut off your nose to spite your face.
Blog text (34) -
However, I think this might be a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Blog text (32) -
That is cutting off your nose to spite your face no matter how you look at it.
Blog text (2) -
With all due respect, sir, you're cutting off your nose to spite your face.
-
That's cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Blog text (19) -
My old business manager from the Teamsters had taught me to "never cut off your nose to spite your face," and this is what many public unions around the country have done.
Blog text (26) -
As my mother would have said, "She’s cutting off her nose to spite her face."
Blog text (29) -
We would like nothing more than to buy all your books and champion your authors to as many people as we can, but you're doing your damndest to cut off your nose to spite your face.
Blog text (32)
How Self-Defeating
- Informal
3
7.1
- Informal
1
9.8
- Informal
20
8.4
Surface Forms
Morphology
cut + off + your + nose + to + spite + your + face
The literal parts ('cut off', 'nose', 'spite', 'face') transparently signal harming oneself out of malice, so a learner who knows the words can grasp a basic idea of self-inflicted harm motivated by spite. However, the precise proverb meaning — doing something intended to hurt another that ends up harming you more — relies on figurative/proverbial inference and cultural knowledge, so the relation is partly but not fully predictable.
Etymology
The idiom cut off your nose to spite your face comes from a shocking picture: someone so angry that they would literally cut off their nose, ruining their own face to 'punish' another person. So, it now means doing something in anger that ends up hurting you more than the person you want to hurt.