Dic: straighten out

1. PHRASAL VERB

If you straighten out a confused situation, you succeed in getting it organized and tidied up.

• He would make an appointment with him to straighten out a couple of things.
• My sister had come in with her calm common sense and straightened them out.
• = sort out

2. [straighten 3] If you straighten something, or it straightens, it becomes straight.

• Straighten both legs until they are fully extended.
• The road straightened and we were on a plateau.
• No one would dream of straightening out the knobbly spire at Empingham Church.

... Cobuild

• Impatience with "the twisted timber of humanity" has, of course, a long lineage--so long, indeed, that policy making should have learned from it; policy should grow from the ground up. In fact, the hold of new institutional thinking, in politics and in business, skirts doing so. Edmund Burke, Kant, and other observers of French Revolution watched in horror as the revolutionaries monitored and attacked the realities of everyday life, trying to straighten out the twisted timber; the character of modern reform is instead uninterested; it negelects the ground because daily life seems merely provisinal.

... Google Books: The Culture of the New Capitalism