Word: cudgeled
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...Harvard score since 1891. Undergraduate jubiliation, however, slowly died and turned to dismay as Holy Cross, Dartmouth and Princeton drubbed the Crimson on successive weekends. In the gloom overemphasis in college football. Mother Advocate, sensing crusade in the making, trudged a few yards up Plympton Street to borrow the cudgel. "Football" she said in her October issue, "may actually become professional...
Harvard's first head, the controversial Master Nathaniel Eaton, flogged disobedient undergraduates, and in 1639 he clobbered a faculty assistant with a "walnut tree cudgel," compared to which the modern billy club would be a toothpick...
Candidates of most parties, however, had done little more than cudgel their brains for spectacular schemes to attract attention. A woman candidate had persuaded one of her pretty girl campaign workers to do a strip for the cause. In a Chiba Prefecture town another candidate had stationed henchmen in all the local firehouses. Whenever an alarm came in, the watchmen tipped off campaign headquarters and the candidate's loudspeaker truck sped off to the scene of the fire to harangue the crowd...
They usually did. Although Mencken tore great holes in the fabric of U.S. manners & morals, he almost always let in more air than light. His job, at a time when the job needed doing, was to cudgel Comstockery and hack at hypocrisy, and he did both with a zest that makes his pages effervesce 30 years after their subjects were topical. Mencken, whatever the college boys may have thought a quarter-century ago, was no great thinker; he was a man of stout prejudices, with a gift and vocabulary for iconoclastic expression even richer than Mark Twain...
Toward the end Author Costain tries to liven things up a bit. Félicité is dragged by her ankles, with her pretty thighs exposed, by her brutal nobleman husband whom she has been forced to marry, is beaten by him with a cudgel "not thicker than a man's thumb," and is kidnaped by Indians. This, presumably, is what readers of this kind of novel have been waiting for, but it is a long wait, and they are in for further dull stretches before virtue and justice at last prevail...