Word: cudgeling
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
...gamy Memphis another clean-up campaign was in full swing, and as usual owl-eyed, benign Boss Ed Crump, 67, was the prime cudgel-wielder. This time he was after the cats. Memphis songbirds were in peril, said the boss, so cats must go. A "nice house cat" was all right, but tramps of either sex were out. Promptly cattraps began to appear in Memphis back yards, particularly those of county and city employes. County Commissioner Francis Andrews trapped three right...
...college presents the possibility of similar suspensions whenever a Smith paper or magazine prints some article that the administration does not like. A college publication which is not free to criticize its institution is practically useless. It is unfortunate that no other Smith editors took up the cudgel on behalf of their unfortunate sister, for by failing to do so they were contributing to their own nullification...
...Vega (alias Zorro), the Spanish Robin Hood of sixteenth century California. He rescues peasants, puts villains to the sword, and woos fair ladies with swashbuckling bravado. But porcine Engene Pallete steals acting honors as a he-man parish priest who crosses himself with one hand while wielding a wicked cudgel with a other. Basil Rathbone, who dictates to the local Franco, meets the just desserts of sneering down a long nose; and Linda Darnell drops in just long enough for two kisses. All of which goes to make "Mark of Zorro" a colorful, exciting mellerdrammer...