rub out something/someone
rub
noun[ C ]
us/rʌb/
The rub is something that prevents success:
She got good reviews for her original cooking, but the rub was that people wanted very traditional dishes.

Examples of rub

rub
At the outset, all the musical genres and all the individuals rubbed shoulders with one another without inhibition.
She would rub my back for long stretches of time.
But there's the rub: historians are generally not interested in bringing complexity to the texts they use as sources, and for very good reasons.
To sleep, perchance to learn - aye, there's the rub!
Even the term "rubber" comes from one of the material's innumerable handy uses: rubbing out pencil marks.
The rub here is that a strong constituency for a sensible reform programme has yet to emerge.
The seeds were rubbed with sand to remove the mesocarp tissue and washed with water.
Where evident, the metaphysical dexterity of their similes rubs off on the purveyor.
Seeds from these species were removed from fruits manually, by rubbing on a rubber mat.
It would get rubbed out every day and then it would be drawn again.
Well, he would undress his women, so that they could be rubbed with oil, and he cohabited with each one.
Fruits were soaked in water and then rubbed with sand.
And all of these meet with and rub up against all other languages all over the world in a vast sociopolitical tangle.
Damage types 7, 9 and 10 represent localized rubbing; damage type 8 depicts rubbing along the wing venation.
Even wing rubbing, fading or fraying, previously referred to as a nuisance factor, may be of intrinsic interest.
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