Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A brutal taskmaster.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a cruel employer who demands excessive work from the employees
- noun the cruel slave dealer in an anti-slavery novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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Herman Ackmann, aka Simon Legree, is famous for running poor folks out of town.
Archive 2005-02-01 Michael Caddell 2005
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Herman Ackmann, aka Simon Legree, is famous for running poor folks out of town.
Herman will most likely go for hanging us from the lamposts! Michael Caddell 2005
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"Uncle Tom's Cabin" was abolitionist propaganda, but it was also a brilliant novel that intertwined the stories of a host of memorable characters: the long-suffering slave Uncle Tom, the sadistic overseer Simon Legree, the defiant fugitive George Harris, the antic slave girl Topsy, the conscience-stricken slave owner Augustine St. Clare, and a teeming cast of abolitionists, Southerners and African-Americans.
The Novel That Changed America Fergus M. Bordewich 2011
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Simon Legree may not be the most subtle character in American literature, but the vicious slave owner who brings Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to the brink of bad melodrama serves a purpose.
Discord and democracy: What we can learn about Cairo from Puccini's 'Tosca' Philip Kennicott 2011
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You're not going to have much luck convincing them that they're all clones of Simon Legree.
"The Spy Next Door" (2010) Steven Barnes 2010
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(It was a trick question: They've both channeled Scrooge beautifully, and added a more than a pinch of Simon Legree.)
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The North will bust with ill-concealed delight because Simon Legree has been kicked in the balls.
THE NUMBERS 2010
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Like the personification of Bernie Madoff, Simon Legree and Uncle Scrooge all rolled into one, they draw together in a perfect vision of the financial killing yet to come.
The U.S. Federal Budget Pipeline: Where Do The Dollars Drain? 2009
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"Judy Shelton, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, says the IMF risks becoming" a sort of Simon Legree, representing the rich Western nations dictating to the Russians the size of their social safety net.
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"Heredity Research reveals Chambliss DNA link to Othello, Caligula, Herod, Simon Legree, Jabba the Hut" -- further study indicates Karl Rove is his own excretory aperture!
Election Judo 2008
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