Could you give me an example sentence where this verb means this. I can't find anywhere. I don't know if this verb can take a direct object like "neck" or something like that, because if we take a look at other meaning of the verb "to stop somebody in order to talk to them", I think that these sentences that I made up are ambiguous.
He collared him and started talking to him.
He collared her in her room when she was about to get out.
I think that this sentences can be umbiguous, because I think that they can mean both. I hope you understand my question.
Best Answer
Collar may mean ‘put a collar on’—on a wild animal for instance, to track its movements—but it usually means ‘arrest’ or ‘seize’, and is said of the action of police or similar officers. The underlying sense is, as you say, to “grab or seize by the collar or neck”, but this is applied figuratively. Here are a couple of instances:
This meaning is sometimes jocularly extended from the apprehension of criminals to other seizures. In the first half of the 20th century it was often used to mean ‘take’ or ‘filch’: H.L. Mencken, for instance, writes of appropriating an artwork created for a magazine where he worked:
Collar is also frequently used today in the sense you ask about: to ‘arrest’ or ‘detain’ not in a law-enforcement sense but in order to compel attention or conversation: