Pull Off and Pecking Order

Today's phrasal is Pull Off, which has three meanings
1) to manage to do something difficult or tricky.  

No-one thought that she would be able to do it, but she pulled it off in the end.
I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to pull off paying my bills this month. 

2)To start moving (vehicles)

When the lights turned green, the car pulled off.
Mary called out to Steve, who was in his car, that they needed milk, but he pulled off  just at that moment.

3) To remove a part from something.

Robert pulled off the top of the box and poured some cereal
Oscar is a nasty little boy.  He likes to pull the antennae off of snails.

Notes: the first meaning of Pull Off is separable. It is common to hear it as "pull it off".  The second is intransitive and the third is transitive and separable.


Today's idiom is Pecking Order, which means
The order of importance or rank. Any hierarchical order, as among people in a particular group

The pecking order in the high school locker room clearly ran from the most muscular to the least. 
The pecking order in my company runs from the boss and his secretary to the receptionist.  She always has to follow whatever the secretary says, and I do whatever the receptionist tells me. 

Note: Pecking order refers to how chickens establish dominance. Chickens can be quite vicious. If a chicken has a small wound with a spot of blood, it must be removed from the flock. Otherwise, it is in grave danger of being pecked to death by the others. "The famous study made by biologists W.C. Allee in the 1920s establishes that the pecking order among hens has a definite prestige pattern, hens, like many humans, freely peck at other hens below their rank and submit to pecking from those above them. Hens rarely peck at roosters in the barnyard, where the rooster is the cock of the walk, but it was widely believed in the 17th century that they often pulled feathers from roosters below them in the pecking order."