RichThesaurus
give someone a dressing down
vs
tear someone a new one
give someone a dressing down
tear someone a new one
verb
To express great anger toward (a person) for some perceived offence or shortcoming; to castigate.
How often have the words
give someone a dressing down
and
tear someone a new one
occurred in a corpus of books?
(source:
Google Ngram Viewer
)