narrow-gauge

Relating to narrow gauge or having a narrow gauge.

On once more we swung, bumping uneasily along in the antique narrow-gauge coach, with gloomy woods and gathering night outside, shouts and songs (and quacks) inside—this was not at all the sort of train ordained by the logical strategists in Paris—then grinding to a stop at a mysterious halt which was no more than a nameboard in the pinewoods, without even a footpath leading to it, but nevertheless with a solitary passenger stolidly waiting.

Limited or petty.

It seems to the editors that this is somehow curiously reminiscent of Whorf's defense of Native American languages and cultures in the face of narrow-gauge views on language and culture at the time, without going so far as to take a strict Sapir-Whorfian stance that might posit unbridgeable gaps in translation theory and practice from one culture to the next.