To criticize harshly or scold someone; to beat or cudgel with a stick.
From Latin fustigare, from fustis meaning club or stick, and -igare (to beat). The word originally meant a physical beating with a stick but evolved to mean fierce criticism or verbal attack.
This word is a rare gem that survived from Latin mostly in English legal and formal writing—it's the ancestor of Spanish 'fustigar' and Italian 'frustare,' and somewhere in medieval monasteries, monks were using it to describe beating students literally or figuratively.
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