speak down to

Idioms  

1. see talk down to.

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Example Sentences

“We just have to not speak down to them.”

From New York Times

The guards, Frantz said, “intimidate you a lot. They speak down to you a lot. It’s not a pleasant atmosphere.”

From Reuters

“She’s not pedantic. She assumes her audience is intelligent and doesn’t speak down to him,” Ms. Briggs said.

From New York Times

We drove around in his BMW convertible with the top down while he played Billy Idol; we ate a sandwich outside the Pompidou Center, where he told me family secrets; he gave me his copy of “American Psycho” because he didn’t ever speak down to me or fetishize my youth or try to protect me; he took us to Euro Disney, right when it first opened, him insisting that we go despite our ages, all the time looking around in disgust and saying, “Look at all this canned happiness!”

From New York Times

“You do not have to speak down to kids, to dumb things down. Kids are game for complexity, for new experiences,” the director reports.

From Los Angeles Times