11 June 2014

drubbing

[druhb-ing]

noun

1. a beating; a sound thrashing.
2. a decisive, humiliating defeat, as in a game or contest.

Origin:
1640–50; drub + -ing

drub [druhb]

verb (used with object), drubbed, drub·bing.

1. to beat with a stick or the like; cudgel; flog; thrash.
2. to defeat decisively, as in a game or contest.
3. to drive as if by flogging: Latin grammar was drubbed into their heads.
4. to stamp (the feet).

noun
5. a blow with a stick or the like.

Origin:
1625–35; perhaps by uncertain mediation < Arabic ḍarb blow, beating

Related forms
drub·ber, noun
un·drubbed, adjective

Anagram

bring Bud
bind grub

Today’s aphorism

There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

– Arundhati Roy

On this day

11 July 1977 – Nine years after his assassination, Martin Luther King is posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by United States President Jimmy Carter.

11 July 1979 – US space station, Skylab, ignites on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, causing debris to rain down on Australia. The space station was unoccupied at the time.