out of one's element

Grammar usage guide and real-world examples

You can render the word in a variety of ways, the most usual being "out of one's element," a translation I find imperfect, lacking as it does a sense of rootless irresponsibility that goes a long way toward explaining things people get up to in hotels.

In an interview on Saturday, Ms. Christo said that she would not contract out the production of one element of the station's news programming nor would she carve a for-profit venture from a nonprofit.

That is the one that ended up on the record, so he had great ideas like that which would sort of take us out of our own element.

Among all out-of-place elements in π, let π i be the one with the greatest absolute value.

I am out of my element.

I was completely out of my element on this one.

But he leaves out one crucial element of the Artaudian equation: magic.

If a set, \(S\), is r.e. and co-r.e. then we can list out all of its elements in one column and we can list out all of its non-elements in a second column.

Brighton and Hove council chief executive John Barradell spoke at the event on the day his authority announced budget cuts of £82m over four years, and the creation of a workers' co-op out of the elements of one of the council's services.

Unfortunately, while most elements of this specification can be parsed out using one of the many XML libraries, certain elements do not render themselves to facile interpretation.

One primer was chosen out of the insertion element and the secondary primer out of the neighbouring genomic region.