bare bones

By metaphor with the skeleton versus the whole body including the flesh.

bare bones pl (plural only)

1. The essential elements of something; the minimum viable set of elements; especially when they are described without going into detail.

   He had only been taught the bare bones of the system, but carried on regardless.

   • 1982 April 10, Michael Bronski, “We Are How We Cook”, in Gay Community News, page 7:

     The bare bones of a cookbook are its recipes, but as a genre it is so elastic and malleable that it can contain a range of other purposes and dimensions.

   • 2025 July 23, Richard Wilcock, “A new dawn for the Electrostars”, in RAIL, number 1040, page 27:

     Typically, this meant that the teams were turning around two sets a week, with a train rolling into the depot on a Sunday for what Hinze describes as a "big strip-out". This would pull the carriages back almost to the bare bones.

• bare-boned