Word: whacking
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...condensed as one on a clean new blanket which the 30th Infantry, now stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco, last week draped upon Arizona and then saluted. While the men marched by him, Arizona, little knowing that he had committed "valor under fire," but doubtless remembering many a whack on the behind in the days when he dragged a field gun, rolled a mulish eye at Brigadier-General Frank C. Bolles and mulishly munched carrots...
...TIME [Oct. 10] I am desecrated to read of an "octogenarian thwack." What is a thwack if it is not a "fancy spelling" of whack...
Thwack v. Whack...
...words can be perfect synonyms. A "whack" is a blow delivered much in the same way as a "thwack," but it presupposes a certain capable nonchalance in the deliverer. A thwack is a blow delivered more clumsily, though with equal vigor, by some person not accustomed to administering physical violences; as a timid schoolboy, an enraged English butler, any octogenarian...
...nest for mice. But broom or sweeper cleaned only the surface of the carpet. To get the deeply imbedded dirt the careful housewife had to lift her carpets each spring, hang them on the clothesline in the back yard and then hope for a tramp to come along and whack the dirt out of the carpets. If no bummer appeared, she knew that she would be obliged to quarrel with her husband that evening before he would do the "dirty work." Therefore, she often beat the carpets herself and got her long hair, her eyes and her lungs filled with...