schoolmarm

plural schoolmarms · alternative school marm · alternative school-marm

1. USslangA female teacher, especially one seen to be old-fashioned and extremely severe and strict.

   The schoolmarm came to an abrupt stop in her arithmetic quizzing, her face set into a pruny scowl that looked to be permanent.

   2013, Josh Rountree, Lon Prater, Alamo Rising

   1 more example

   I never thought of [my granfather] as "colorful." Matter of fact, he was an unsavory old coot - not a good influence for a growing boy by the standards of those times. Mmm, there was something about a young schoolmarm and him in the town my family had lived in, some scandal - "scandal" for those days, I mean - and I think that was why we moved.

   1972, Robert A Heinlein, Time Enough For Love

2. broadlySomeone who acts like a schoolmarm, especially in being stern and prissy.

   Bernstein, am I a stuffed shirt? Am I a horse-faced hypocrite? Am I a New England school marm?

   1941, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Orson Welles, Citizen Kane (motion picture), spoken by Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), RKO Radio Pictures

3. businessA tree with two or more trunks; a forked tree.

   His brother Thomas, impaled upon the "schoolmarm tree," had opened his mouth to cry but snow and wind hurled back the words into his throat so that nothing emerges but white froth.

   1939, Howard O'Hagan, Tay John, McClelland and Stewart, →ISBN, page VIII

present singular third person schoolmarms · participle present schoolmarming · participle past schoolmarmed · past schoolmarmed · alternative school marm · alternative school-marm

1. USslangtransitiveTo discipline in the manner of a schoolmarm; to harshly reprimand or chide.

   Well, our trouble in America is that we're being schoolmarmed to death. You can see it in any paper you pick up.

   1914, The Cosmopolitan, volume 56, Schlicht & Field, page 458

   2 more examples

   One client, the most mothering member of the group, did exactly that: she took him home, fed him, and schoolmarmed him through the application form.

   2008, Irvin D. Yalom, Molyn Leszcz, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Basic Books, →ISBN

   Kate Winslet is brilliant, but "there is never a moment where she finds out anything about her fellow actors"; even Emma Thompson, whom he clearly adores, is chided for "schoolmarming" on the set of Sense and Sensibility.

   2022 November 3, “Madly, Deeply by Alan Rickman: diary extracts packed with 'profound' observations”, in The Week UK