the.com/bludgeon
the oldest argument settler, requiring no rhetoric and accepting no rebuttal
means To strike someone or something heavily and repeatedly with a blunt, weighty object — or, figuratively, to force a point through sheer relentless pressure; as a noun, the heavy club used for such work.
from The word surfaces in English in the mid-1700s for a short, thick stick used as a weapon, but its parentage is genuinely murky — etymologists shrug here. No clean root has ever been pinned down; it may be related to dialectal or imitative words for something thick and lumpish, but anyone claiming a tidy origin is bludgeoning the evidence. The figurative sense — to batter with arguments rather than fists — grew naturally from the literal, the way a club's logic always does.
- origin unknown
- Etymology stumps scholars, fittingly for a club
- figurative blow
- You can bludgeon someone with statistics now
- first weapon
- Predates spears, blades, and human reason itself
- verb power
- Means to beat or to bully relentlessly
lucy's femur — 3.2 million year old australopithecus bone used to kill another hominid in ethiopia
lucy's killer — the name given to the attacker in south africa's sterkfontein caves, ca. 2 million years ago
judge dredd's lawgiver — fictional mega-city one weapon, but bludgeon mode exists in the comics and 2012 film