Shoehorning

Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Related to Shoehorning: inadequate, puddingstone

Shoehorning

The practice of picking and choosing data to fit a previous prediction. For example, if one predicts a recession but the recession does not materialize, one may identify negative economic information to "prove" that the recession (or at least a slowdown) really happened. Shoehorning connotes ignoring contradictory data.

References in periodicals archive ?

inconspicuously Shoehorning a tennis court into a tight lot often means the big playing surface will dominate the scene.

They squeezed in a tennis court ... inconspicuously

Creating an IT platform on which to better deploy business processes (instead of shoehorning the foot)

The 451 Group: Investment Banks Are Using Grid Computing Deployments as the Connective 'Fabric' for Shared Enterprise IT Infrastructure, Service-Oriented Architecture and Utility Computing

Regrettably, screenwriter Peter Straughan files down all of the barbs in Young's confessional, shoehorning the characters into a generic romantic comedy, replete with outlandish set-pieces.

review: also released

The brainchild of Amrhein and artist Brian Conley, the project worked with the Smithson estate to reenvision his gritty poetics of entropy for the industrial wastelands along the East River, shoehorning an actual dead tree into Pierogi's tiny space and establishing a touch point between the Williamsburg and Smithson generations that predated by several years the current renaissance of interest in the late artist's output--which, of course, includes important production as a writer.