Word: poleaxe
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...York cut) to Japan to study the local cattle-slaughtering techniques on remote farms, where the gentle beasts, with tender humaneness, are made drunk on a bucketful of shochu-crude native booze-before they are led, staggering, carefree and mooing gratefully in a what-the-hell mood, to the poleax. Gourmets attribute the superior quality of Kobe beef to this alcoholic anesthesia as much as to the sensitive Japanese habit of massaging the cattle regularly once a week, thereby marbling the fat through the steak...
...demon boxer, wrestler, rugby player. Before he got his medical degree he shipped on an Arctic whaler as naval surgeon, began the voyage by hanging a mouse on the steward's eye, ended it covered with snow and blood after charging a herd of seals with a poleax. "I just feel as if I could go anywhere, and do anything," he told his admiring mother...
Eight years ago, in Tommy Gallagher's Crusade, James T. Farrell beat his readers over the head with a poleax to make much the same point. Novelist Harry Sylvester, born in Brooklyn and schooled at Notre Dame, is considerably subtler as a storyteller, though hardly more graceful as a writer. Aloysius ("Moon") Gaffney is no anti-Semitic bullyboy like Tommy Gallagher, but a young Manhattan Irishman with a Fordham law degree and large horizons. With luck he will soon become an Assemblyman in Albany, and perhaps in time even sit in the big chair in New York...