hard to justify
3
7.4
- idiom
:
difícil de justificar
- Even as an HSR advocate/fan, I would find it hard to justify taking the train to displace a 40-mile drive.
- seems hard to justify
And that spread becomes harder to justify the larger it gets, which could also then hurt more expensive vehicle demand all around.
- And that spread becomes harder to justify the larger it gets, which could also then hurt more expensive vehicle demand all around.
- It's really hard to justify why you went out of your way to your partner.
Examples
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From the viewpoint of the larger society, secrecy is hard to justify.
Academic text (1991) -
And if an electoral crisis or some other event returns Iraq to civil war, it would be very hard to justify another troop surge to try to stabilize Iraq.
Academic text (2008) -
It's hard to justify a lot of our actions, right?
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However, it was hard to justify how expensive it was.
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It's really hard to justify why you went out of your way to your partner.
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It's pretty hard to justify unless you are selling equipment.
Blog text (25) -
But I still find it hard to justify the cost versus the benefit.
Blog text (20) -
The dichotomy is pretty clear, and I find it hard to justify voting for Romney.
Blog text (17) -
Meanwhile, the former seems hard to justify given the Court's nominally regulatory approach to punitive damages.
Academic text (2004) -
It's hard to justify the high costs of living in the city when many can barely afford rent.
Synonyms
5
6.8
You cannot show it is right or acceptable
1
9.2
Cannot be shown to be right or fair
Not possible to show as right or acceptable
How Justified
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'difficult to defend or explain' is directly derivable from combining 'hard' (difficult) with 'justify' (to provide reasons or evidence), with 'to' functioning as an infinitival marker. This adjective + to-infinitive composition is a common, predictable pattern cross-linguistically, so a B1 learner who knows the constituent words would readily understand the MWE.
Etymology
The phrase _hard to justify_ paints a simple picture: something is hard to make seem right because you cannot justify it with good reasons. That's why we use it when a choice or cost is difficult to explain or call 'reasonable'.