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march to the beat of a different drum

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march to the beat of a different drum (third-person singular simple present marches to the beat of a different drum, present participle marching to the beat of a different drum, simple past and past participle marched to the beat of a different drum)

  1. (idiomatic) To do things in one's own way regardless of societal norms and conventional expectations.
    • 1994 January 10, Penn Jillette, “Las Vegas: Tonight! Miracles, Live!”, in Time:
      Siegfried and Roy, two nuts from Germany, are out of their wealthy little minds. They live in a mansion whose ceiling is painted like the Sistine Chapel, with either Siegfried or Roy (who can remember?) in place of Adam. Roy has a "meditation chamber" (the rest of us have dressing rooms) furnished with a mystic rug and cages for his tigers. They wow the crowd with heavy machinery and endangered-species eugenics. I love S&R. They march to the beat of a different drum machine.
    • 2004, Danny Hakim, “E.P.A. Energy-Saving Spots Give Cars Short Shrift”, in New York Times, retrieved 21 July 2011:
      The ad ends with a shot of Mark pushing the car down a hill and Suzanne saying, "He still marches to the beat of a different drum."
    • 2004, Larry Portis, French Frenzies: A Social History of Pop Music in France, →ISBN, page 114:
      A defense of non-conformism, deceptively simple in tone and construction, and only slightly political, it is the story of a loner . . . who stays in bed on Bastille Day and ignores the military parade . . . "the good people don't like it when you take a path different from theirs," when you march to the beat of a different drum.

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