Verb

(prun)

To remove excess material from a tree or shrub; to trim, especially to make more healthy or productive.

A good grape grower will prune his vines once a year.

* Milton

Our delightful task / To prune these growing plants, and tend these flowers.

(figuratively) To cut down or shorten (by the removal of unnecessary material).

to prune a budget, or an essay

* Francis Bacon

taking into consideration how they [laws] are to be pruned and reformed

(obsolete) To preen; to prepare; to dress.

* Shakespeare

His royal bird / Prunes the immortal wing and cloys his beak.

(Dryden)

(Spenser)

Verb

To chop away at; to whittle down; to mow down.

* Shakespeare

Hew them to pieces; hack their bones asunder.

* 1912 : (Edgar Rice Burroughs), (Tarzan of the Apes), Chapter 6

Among other things he found a sharp hunting knife, on the keen blade of which he immediately proceeded to cut his finger. Undaunted he continued his experiments, finding that he could hack and hew splinters of wood from the table and chairs with this new toy.

To shape; to form.

to hew out a sepulchre

* Bible, Is. li. 1

Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn .

* Alexander Pope

rather polishing old works than hewing out new

(US) To act according to, to conform to; usually construed with (to).

* 1905 , Albert Osborn, : A Biography , ^] Jennings & Graham, [http://books.google.com/books?id=I3UEAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA428&dq=hewed page 428,

Few men measured up to his standard of righteousness; he hewed to the line.

* 1998 , and Lawrence Davidson, Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines , Collectors Press, Inc., ISBN 1-888054-12-3, page 103,

Inside the stories usually hewed to a consistent formula: no matter how outlandish and weird the circumstances, in the end everything had to have a natural, if not plausible, ending—frequently, though not always, involving a mad scientist.

* 2008 , , Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik , Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-12990-8, page 28,

Faculty members and students alike were buzzing with the fashionable nostrums that dominated U.S. education discourse in the late sixties,

* {{quote-news

, year=2012 , date=May 27 , author=Nathan Rabin , title=TV: Review: THE SIMPSONS (CLASSIC): “New Kid on the Block” (season 4, episode 8; originally aired 11/12/1992) , work=The Onion AV Club citation , page= , passage=Hewing to the old comedy convention of beginning a speech by randomly referencing something in eyesight, Homer begins his talk about the birds and the bees by saying that women are like refrigerators: they’re all about six feet tall and weigh three hundred pounds and make ice cubes. }}

*{{quote-web

, date =2013-10-02 , first =Alex , last =Pappademas , title =Leuqes! LEUQES! LEUQES!'' – The ''Shining sequel and what it says about Stephen King , site =Grantland.com , url =http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9751517/the-shining-sequel-career-stephen-king , accessdate = 2013-10-16 }}

*:King recovered the rights on the condition that he'd stop publicly disparaging Kubrick's version. "For a long time I hewed that line," he told CBS News in June. "And then Mr. Kubrick died. So now I figured, what the hell. I've gone back to saying mean things about it."