take up the slack

• pick up the slack

take up the slack (third-person singular simple present takes up the slack, present participle taking up the slack, simple past took up the slack, past participle taken up the slack)

1. To tighten something that is slack so that it is taut.
   • 1996, Dave King, Michael Kaminer, The Mountain Bike Experience:

     You need to take up the slack in your cables so shifters and brakes function properly.

   • 1999, Jackie Clay, Build the Right Fencing for Horses:

     To tighten the wire, thread a stick through both loops of wire; by twisting the stick you will take up the slack in the wires, pulling them taut.

   • 2012, Gabriel J Klein, Second Night: The Spear:

     The engines laboured, straining between the forces of tide and wind to take up the slack on the huge chains and pull the ferry across the water.

2. To do work that would otherwise be left undone.
   • 1995, Bill Tarling, Peter Messaline, In the Background: An Extra's Handbook, page 48:

     A production never has enough time or enough money. Someone has to take up the slack.

   • 2007, Thomas E. Oblinger, Old Man from the Repple Depple, page 311:

     When fighting at the front grew intense and casualties got heavy, traveling teams of surgeons were called in temporarily to take up the slack.

   • 2012, Sandy Steinman, The Small Business Turnaround Guide:

     It is not unusual in turnaround situations for the turnaround manager to eliminate up to 20 percent of the jobs within the company. Is that tough? Of course it is, and the people who remain have to take up the slack, but it is far more preferable than closing the doors.

   • 2013, Jill Sanders, Returning Pride, page 57:

     So he had doubled his efforts around the place to take up the slack.

3. To provide extra resources that are not met by normal sources.
   • 2008, John Michael Greer, The Long Descent:

     As oil production worldwide plateaus and falters, other fossil fuels are coming under strain, and no alternative — renewable or otherwise — shows any sign of being able to take up the slack.

   • 2012, Earl J. Hess, The Civil War in the West:

     ...and local farms were not productive enough to take up the slack.

   • 2012, Eric Jerome Shumpert, Power, Passion and Pain, page 31:

     We have but only one life to live I take you back, you take me back I come up short and you take up the slack

   • 2013, David Miller, Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy, page 208:

     This does not of course prevent people from acting strategically — deciding not to contribute in the hope that others will take up the slack. But it will be clear in these situations that such people are behaving unfairly and that prima facie at least, those who decide to take up the slack are doing more than justice requires.

4. (mathematics) To act as a slack variable, converting an inequality into an equality.
   • 2012, Donald A. Pierre, Optimization Theory with Applications:

     A slack variable is a real variable which is introduced to take up the slack in an inequality constraint, i.e., to convert an inequality constraint to an equality constraint.

5. To consume something that would otherwise go to waste.
   • 1986, Avner Cohen, Steven Lee, Nuclear Weapons and the Future of Humanity:

     It is the nature of monopoly capitalism to create unused industrial capacity and unemployment. The arms economy is an effort to take up the slack in this unused capacity.

   • 1987, Wilderness Planning Amendment:

     Additionally, new export markets may be developed that will take up the slack left by falling demand in the United States.

   • 2013, Michael Burger, The Shaping of Western Civilization, page 124:

     Honor gained through euergetism (i.e., paying for public works that benefited the community), paying to build a school or theater or temple at home, helped take up the slack.

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