overshoot the mark

overshoot the mark

To pass the intended target, typically due to poor judgment. A: "Did I overshoot the mark?" B: "Yeah, I would back up so that your car isn't sticking out of the parking space!" I think we overshot the mark with our estimate.
See also: mark
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

overshoot the mark

1. If you overshoot the mark, you go too far and pass the place where you wanted to be. These birds head for France or Spain but sometimes overshoot the mark and end up in English gardens.
2. If you overshoot the mark, you cause problems by doing something to a greater extent than you intended. A defence cutback took place that went too far — it overshot the mark. Note: The `mark' in these expressions is the target used in archery or shooting.
See also: mark
Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary, 3rd ed.

overshoot (or overstep) the mark

go beyond what is intended or proper; go too far.
See also: mark
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary

overshoot the ˈmark

make a mistake when you are judging the amount, etc. of something: He overshot the mark by about $3 million.If you overshoot the mark, you shoot an arrow further than you intended and miss the target.
See also: mark
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary
See also:
  • stick to
  • stick to (something)
  • cause (some) eyebrows to raise
  • cause eyebrows to raise and cause some raised eyebrows
  • cause raised eyebrows
  • cause some raised eyebrows
  • eyebrow
  • raise (some/a few) eyebrows
  • raise some eyebrows
  • sit in judgment on (one)
References in classic literature
"You go altogether too far--you overshoot the mark. There isn't a woman in the world as bad as you would make yourself out.
"I'm not trying to overshoot the mark. I'm not trying to get a tax cut out of this.
If you still overshoot the mark, remember: better to go to waste than to go to your waist.
It is possible that construction underway in 2011 and subsequently has or will alleviate the apparent shortage of research implied by the data in Figure 1 and overshoot the mark. That remains to be seen.
You're inclined to overshoot the mark. News from a distance corroborates your ideas about the future but there is a need to lower expectations if you are to succeed.
Media and public outrage might overshoot the mark. We might not achieve what we want by covering these stories in the media, because firms adapt.
Lowering volatility and sopping up excess liquidity can be beneficial, but there are risks here as well: regulators can easily overshoot the mark, leaving financial markets with weakened capacity for price discovery and too little liquidity.
On great occasions, he tends to overshoot the mark, calling for impossibilities like an "end to evil." He lacks a rhetorical mean, much less the rhetorical mien that served Ronald Reagan so well.
overshoot the mark. I think that's happened in high-rise condos."
Other thesps, like the normally sensitive Mezzogiorno and Rubini, overshoot the mark in silly caricatures, while a series of famous faces--Umberto Orsini, Mariangela Melato, Michele Placido--turn up in irritating cameos.
To judge from the program of the 2001 meeting the North American Conference on British Studies, many early modern historians have run right by these would-be colleagues and have embraced the issues of "cultural studies." Whole panels (some of them tantalizing) engage "the politics of feasting," "gender, class, and consumer behavior," "sight, smell, and taste," "social and cultural space," "masculinity," "working women," and "early cultures of the object." Has the mad dash to the middle led some on each side, as it were, to overshoot the mark?
It's very volatile and tends to overshoot the mark in both directions," he says, citing as an example the high prices of 18 months ago.
However, I venture to argue that the more adamant of Moore's disciples--those who reject science and empirical knowledge as sources of normative ethical guidance--badly overshoot the mark. In his germinal book Consilience, Wilson argues that ought is a shorthand term for the compelling force of the store of useful social experience, a compact generalization from those behaviors that have served the evolution of our socially interdependent species.
Vatikanisches Konzil (Stuttgart, 1977), that the deliberations were not free, or that the majority bishops were manipulated like marionettes, overshoot the mark. Schatz's critical distance and balance lend his nuanced judgments an authority that all scholars and commentators on the Council will have to reckon with.
(When you take the spray head off a long straight spout, you'll find that it tends to overshoot the mark as you water.)