Citations:hostage

noun

uncountable

• 2010 December 15, Michael Barber, Schutzian Research, Zeta Books, volume 4, page 119:

  Proceeding this way, Lahire's proposal leaves the interviewee even more hostage of the researcher and, even worse, it leaves without consideration the chosen thematic and the discursive forms of the interviewee […]

attributive use

• 2004, José Angel Figueroa, Red, White, and Blues, Poets on the Promise of America, “The Jelly Bean Policy”, University of Iowa Press, page 57:

  everyone laughed / but the laughter had / its own impressions / and he felt like / a hostage doll / given jelly beans / to play with

• 2008 December 10, Thalassa Ali, A Singular Hostage, Random House Publishing Group, page 53:

  Yusuf floated, weaponless, over the Citadel, the hostage child in his arms.

• 2008 May, Glynnis Campbell, Sarah McKerrigan (pseudonym), Danger’s Kiss, Grand Central Publishing, chapter 24, unpaged:

  After seeing that Desirée was fed and cleaned up, she had her gagged and blindfolded for the trek home, so she wouldn’t know the whereabouts of the ruined mill and her hostage pet.

• 2014 April 10, Enoch Chang, Secret Intelligence, Dark Rim, Partridge Publishing Singapore, page 19:

  He turned to the hostage man that was now wide-eyed.

• 2015 November 15, Elias Chacour and Mary E. Jensen, We Belong to the Land, The Story of a Palestinian Israeli Who Lives for Peace and Reconciliation, University of Notre Dame Press, unpaged:

  The hostage goat was free and had stopped screaming, but did not leave.

modified as "psychologically hostage"

• 1987, Second Opinion: 1987:

  ... obliged to use their information in deciding whether or not to participate, and dependent on their skills and judgment for his safety and even survival. Frequently, the subject is psychologically hostage to the researcher/doctor by dint of being ...

• 1989, Philip Pilevsky, Captive Continent: The Stockholm Syndrome in European-Soviet Relations, Praeger Pub Text:

  I observe that Europe is already psychologically hostage to the Soviet Union. How have the Soviets accomplished this? That is the question I will address in the following chapters.

• 2007, ELH:

  Heathcliff, however, remains forever psychologically hostage to the friend who loves/rejects him.

• 2008, Mary Sharpe, Suicide Bombers: The Psychological, Religious and Other Imperatives, IOS Press (→ISBN), page 154:

  Yet together it carries a powerful psychological punch because the chaos seems impossible to make sense of – terror which cannot be explained and put into words holds us psychologically hostage.

in the phrase "kept hostages"

• 1891, Charles George Gordon, Events in the Taeping Rebellion, page 421:

  The captain had been allowed to go to Shanghai on the promise that he would return with a new fan, which he never did. The Manilla man with others of the crew were kept hostages, and were not allowed to go. They eventually escaped, […]

• 2009, P. K. Arya, Career In Media, Prabhat Prakashan (→ISBN), page 14:

  Two correspondents, each from Israel and Portugal were kept hostages by the American troops for days on end. Some scribes were denied food for upto four days in a row as punishment, some were denied perks.

• 2009, L. J. Oltean, The Cozia Manuscript, Liviu Oltean (→ISBN), page 35:

  Only two years later was he allowed to return to his country after promising not to participate in any western military actions against the Turkish empire, and as a guarantee his two sons were kept hostages.

in the phrases "keep hostage", "take hostage", "hold hostage"

• 2006, Richard J. Samuels, Encyclopedia of United States National Security - Volume 1:

  The remaining 52 Americans, however, were kept hostage in Iran until the very end of the crisis.

• 2006, John A. Carter, God, Get Me Out of This One...!, Inkwell Productions, page 113:

  It not only enslaves us, but those whom we love as well. My addiction was holding those I loved the most hostage and no one was safe.

• 2011, George Kohlrieser, Hostage at the Table, page 31:

  “I don't want to interrupt and force myself on her, so I let her play and do whatever she's doing. I don't want to be a bad father.” Scott allowed his fear of being a bad father to take him hostage.

• 2011, Nalini Singh, Hostage to Pleasure:

  If he was going to be held hostage to this unwanted compulsion, then she was damn well coming along for the ride.

• 2011, Corneliu C. Simuţ, Essentials of Catholic Radicalism, An Introduction to the Lay Theology of Vito Mancuso, Peter Lang, page 41:

  This explains why, having presented the attraction of evil as being stronger than the good, Mancuso writes that there is something which seduces, conquers, and takes hostage man’s heart, and this is the force.

• 2014, Vonnie Hughes, Innocent Hostage:

  Although Kit had his head buried in Breck's shoulder, he was amazingly composed for a little boy who'd just been held hostage by his stepfather.

• 2015, The Worldwatch Institute, State of the World 2006: Special Focus: China and India, page 129:

  The aid deal is now held hostage to political maneuvering.

in the phrases "make hostage", "render hostage"

• 1984, Campaign Finance Reform, Hearings Held Before the Task Force on Elections of the Committee on House Administration, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninety-eighth Congress, First Session, U.S. Government Printing Office, page 376:

  Beyond campaigns, interactive television will permit every issue, no matter how complex or difficult, to be presented in the simplest of terms in instant electronic referendum which will make every elected official even more hostage to short-term public whim than today.

• 2009 September, D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God, Christianity Confronts Pluralism, Zondervan, page 159:

  But then I fear we make faith so hostage to the painfully faddish and idiosyncratic opinions of learned scholars that not only do few ordinary Christians enjoy access to knowledge by which to assess their scholars, but we lose whatever warrant we once had […]

• 2010 December 23, Andrew Phillips, War, Religion and Empire, The Transformation of International Orders, Cambridge University Press, page 193:

  Thus, the shifting military balance between Manchu rulers and Han subjects inaugurated by the rebellions rendered the monarchy even more hostage to the sentiments of Han elites, while the advent of military provincialism also created new opportunities for social mobility outside the straightjacket of the imperial bureaucracy.

• 2018 December 10, Thomas W. Zarzecki, Arms Diffusion, The Spread of Military Innovations in the International System, Taylor & Francis, unpaged:

  Among middle-wealth states, the high (and increasing) cost of major weapons systems and their support infrastructures renders their acquisition even more hostage to the level of resources available in state coffers.

in the phrases "be hostage", "remain hostage"

• 1981 August, Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar, The Abyss, Farrar Straus and Giroux, pages 175-176:

  This cumbersome envelope of flesh which he had to wash, feed, and water, heat at the fireplace or beneath the pelt of some slaughtered beast, and put to sleep at night like a child or like a helpless old man, was hostage to the whole of nature, and even more hostage to his fellow men.

• 1981, Raritan, A Quarterly Review, Rutgers University, page 135:

  Book 4 is the least self-contained of the poem’s books, the most hostage to romance contingency. Imposing justice at the beginning of Book 5 therefore becomes a project deeply connected to the literary mode of the whole.

• 2002 February, Neil Tennant, The Taming of the True, Clarendon Press, page 421:

  Every such statement (and especially ones involving generality) is hostage to future evidence that is not yet available. Moreover, it is almost always so hostage in the company of yet other conjectural statements.

• 2015 July 31, Matteo Legrenzi, The GCC and the International Relations of the Gulf, Diplomacy, Security and Economic Coordination in a Changing Middle East, I.B.Tauris, unpaged:

  Furthermore, as a successful trade and business centre it remains even more hostage to downturns in the world economy and to regional instability.

• 2017 August 4, Matti Eklund, Choosing Normative Concepts, OUP Oxford, page 132:

  […] analytic metaphysics is a rather successful enterprise which relies on intuitions, and these intuitions are obviously hostage to metaphysical fortune. But such intuitions still have a different, less secure standing than do linguistic intuitions that are not so hostage.

adjective

• 1993, Andy Clark, Associative engines: connectionism, concepts, and representational change, MIT Press, page 174:

  […] the consequent gradual expansion of our capacities to actively explore an environment (creating more and more complex self-training data as we do so), might be one source of a kind of natural “staged training”—one obviously less hostage to environmental fortune, since we are creating our own training data as we go along.

• 2005, Russell B. Goodman, Pragmatism, Critical Concepts in Philosophy, Routledge, page 283:

  eliminate the special jargon of law, as the realists urge, and you will find yourself not in the cleared ground of an epistemological reform (“now I see face to face”) but in the already occupied ground of some other line of work no less special, no less hostage to commitments it can neither name nor recognize.

• 2008, Coping with Broker-dealer Regulation & Increasing Enforcement, Practising Law Institute, page 589:

  Despite being very hostage to the WM [Wealth Management] franchise for distribution of these products (we are pressing as hard as we can), we are reaching deep into the institutional client base to take these.

• 2009 May, Michael Shapiro, A Sense of Place, Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration, page 180:

  Once you’ve made that decision, when you get back home you have to decide to what extent you’re going to be hostage to your notes. I was always very hostage to my notes.

• 2011, Charles Travis, Objectivity and the Parochial, OUP Oxford, pages 17 and 24:

  Thus, their correctness (truth) is no more hostage to how things in fact are than the mesh’s correctness is. […] The role of a law of logic, one might well think, is precisely not to be so hostage.

new citations

• 1790, Gibbons Bagnall (translator), François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon (abp. of Cambrai.), A new translation of Telemachus in English verse, page 311:

  See ! for his ſide Telemachus declare, / Myſelf too hoſtage for his faith appear: / Frankly our perſons to yourſelves we yield, / Till all the King hath promis’d be fulfill’d.

• 1995, Kelly Cherry, Writing the world, University of Missouri Press, page 18:

  It was not the war, because my father, who had gone immediately to the recruiting center, was deemed too old, too hostage to parental responsibilities, and much too nearsighted.

• 2002, Chronicles, Rockford Institute, page 48:

  This is a thriller that cuts deeply into our unacknowledged class divisions. It also reports stingingly on how hostage we are to those perfect images that so often belie the truth of our lives.

• 2006 September 25, Deborah Rhode, In Pursuit of Knowledge, Scholars, Status, and Academic Culture, Stanford University Press, chapter 1, page 19:

  Yet at the same time, universities have also been criticized for moving in the opposite direction and becoming too “relevant” and too hostage to market demands.

• 2013 Jeremy Wisnewski, Heidegger, An Introduction, Rowman & Littlefield, chapter 8, page 160:

  Although Being and Time was indeed revolutionary, Heidegger came to think of it as still far too hostage to the philosophical tradition to which it responded.

• 2013 December, Mark Timmons (editor), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, OUP Oxford, volume 3, chapter 5, pages 98-99:

  Self-ownership is attractive because it appears to offer a satisfyingly direct and not very hostage to empirical fortune justification for such protections. […] Consequentialism, it is often thought, makes the protection of our Millian liberties too hostage to empirical fortune, for we can easily imagine cases in which interfering with a person’s Millian liberties creates more value.

• 2014 November, Rama Bijapurkar, A Never-Before World, Tracking the Evolution of Consumer India, Penguin Books Limited, unpaged:

  ‘The desired pathways out of wage labour for those who could manage it was owning a business of your own, no matter how precarious the ownership . . . or how hostage it was to the “arbitrary state”’

• 2016 April 30, Edward Janak, Politics, Disability, and Education Reform in the South, The Work of John Eldred Swearingen, Palgrave Macmillan US, page 40:

  Much of Swearingen’s work of the period demonstrated not only how powerful a hold social notions of disability had on his professors, but also how hostage to his times were many of Swearingen’s own opinions.

verb

• 1977, Guérard Piffard, A translation of the cycle of Willame of Orange:

  Not one will ever be hostaged for goods. They are close to death, if you do not help them.

• 1995, Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation, Univ of Massachusetts Press (→ISBN), page 292:

  […] most pathetically in NASA's Challenger space shuttle disaster, in which a schoolteacher's life was hostaged to the failure of U.S. technology; most absurdly in the drama of a little girl hostaged to the elements by a fall down a Texas well shaft; ...

• 2001, Jaime C. Laya, Letras Y Figuras: Business in Culture, Culture in Business (→ISBN):

  […] , with a cherished heirloom, hostaged for tuition money till the next harvest.

• 2008, Augusto Antonio A. Aguila, Joyce L. Arriola, John Jack G. Wigley, Philippine literatures: texts, themes, approaches:

  The Sire shows no surprise for the lad's entry for he apparently set this trap to imprison a young man of Denis de Beaulieu's vulnerability for the purpose of hostaging him into a wedding with his niece Blanche de Maletroit.