to rough it
15
7.5
- phrasal verb
- /rʌf ɪt/
- Informal
:
vivir sin comodidades
- All they need to know is that you are roughing it in a tent.
- roughing it in a tent
- want to rough it
- idea of roughing it
So yeah, we haven't exactly been roughing it the whole time we've been here.
- So yeah, we haven't exactly been roughing it the whole time we've been here.
- We haven't roughed it down Changi River and so on.
- And the crew, we roughed it, man, you really would never know.
- Top three, man, I'd say go to when I was truly roughing it.
- I mean when we got through like holy shit, you know like these guys were fucking roughing it and this was like real deal.
Examples
-
So we'll rough it for the night.
-
If you're happy to rough it, you'll relish the experience.
Blog text (17) -
We'll show you how we rough it in America?
-
Well, girls, are you ready to rough it?
-
"I can rough it," Donna says.
Fiction book (1991) -
I've warned the girl she may have to rough it.
-
In the meantime... I'm roughing it.
-
Amos, the outdoorsman, loved roughing it, and he appreciated an honest day's work.
Blog text (11) -
People say camping involves roughing it in the wilderness, but here you got bamboo countertops and a hot shower.
-
We decided to rough it during our weekend camping trip to enjoy the outdoors.
Synonyms
Live with difficulty because you have little money
Manage to live with very little money
How Comfortable
Surface Forms
Morphology
rough + it
The adjective 'rough' clearly conveys hardship, so a learner who knows 'rough' can plausibly infer that 'rough it' involves experiencing difficulties; however, 'it' is a dummy pronoun that adds no literal content, and the phrase is an idiomatic verbing of an adjective. The meaning 'live without comforts' is therefore a motivated but conventionalized extension rather than fully compositional, making the expression partially predictable but requiring some exposure to the construction.
Etymology
Rough it may come from the simple image of the word rough: sleeping on hard, uneven ground or using rough things with no soft beds or running water. That's why rough it means 'to live without the usual comforts' for a short time.