puhekieltä To chop away at; to whittle down; to mow down.
Shakespeare
Hew them to pieces; hack their bones asunder.
1912: (w), (w), 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.
puhekieltä To shape; to form.
(ux)
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
puhekieltä To act according to, to conform to; usually construed with(m).
Few men measured up to his standard of righteousness; he hewed to the line.
1998, w:Frank M. Robinson|Frank M. Robinson and Lawrence Davidson, Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines,http://books.google.com/books?id=mhYfL6Dn5g8C 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, w:Chester E. Finn, Jr.|Chester E. Finn, Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik,http://books.google.com/books?id=Kny99CXP0kQC 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, (..) These hewed to the recommendations of the Plowden Report, (..)
{{quote-journal
{{quote-web
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."