drag up

English

Verb

drag up (third-person singular simple present drags up, present participle dragging up, simple past and past participle dragged up)

1. To remind people of (something, usually unpleasant, from the past).

   I don't know why John had to drag up the incident of the car accident. It was really embarrassing.

   • April 5 2022, Tina Brown, “How Princess Diana’s Dance With the Media Impacted William and Harry”, in Vanity Fair‎^[1]:

     It’s hard to understand how a mother as devoted as Diana would choose, in 1995, to drag up her affair with Hewitt again in her explosive interview with the BBC’s Martin Bashir on Panorama. She knew how devastated her boys had been by their father’s on-camera confession of infidelity with Camilla Parker Bowles in Jonathan Dimbleby’s 1994 ITV documentary, and how truly mortified they felt when Princess in Love came out.

     adapted from the book The Palace Papers, published 2022 by Penguin Books

2. (transitive, figurative) To educate reluctant pupils.
   • 1909, Archibald Marshall [pseudonym; Arthur Hammond Marshall], chapter II, in The Squire’s Daughter, New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, published 1919, →OCLC:

     "I don't want to spoil any comparison you are going to make," said Jim, "but I was at Winchester and New College." ¶ "That will do," said Mackenzie. "I was dragged up at the workhouse school till I was twelve. […]"

3. (transitive, UK, figurative) To raise a child with insufficient discipline or instillment of social etiquette.
   • 1852, Charles Dickens, Bleak House:

     It is said that the children of the very poor are not brought up, but dragged up.

4. Of a man: to dress in women's clothing for entertainment.
5. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see drag,‎ up.

Anagrams

• updrag