Meaning
To hold back - to criticise or compete less forcefully than you could, softening blows you are perfectly capable of landing. The phrase lives almost entirely in the negative: what gets reported is who refused to pull their punches. Strongest in the negative; 'she doesn't pull any punches' is the form interviewers reach for. Regional use: General English (boxing origin).
Origin
Boxing, at its most literal. Pulling a punch means shortening or slowing it so the glove lands without full force - the everyday mercy of sparring, and, in the era of arranged outcomes, the technique of the fighter who had sold the bout. Wiktionary's etymology records the idiom as originally from boxing, with first use around the 1920s, and Cambridge defines the surviving idiom almost purely in its negative form - not pull any punches, to speak honestly without trying to be kind. No authoritative first citation is freely available beyond that consensus, so the dating is reported conservatively; what is secure is the shape of the transfer, in which the fist deliberately withheld became the criticism deliberately softened, and the negation became the compliment.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- not pull any punches
- pull no punches
- pulled their punches
Usage Examples
- The report pulled no punches: water treatment had been underfunded for a decade and the council had been told.
- Reviewers who pull their punches do the director no favours, and this one clearly agreed.
- He did not pull any punches about his own season, which he graded as a four out of ten.