Cudgel -- Nothing Cuddly About It

During a conversation last night on group politics and the misunderstandings people in the midst of a debate can have of the other side's intentions, I picked up on Mark's use of the phrase "offer an olive branch." "Well," I said, "one person's olive branch is another person's cudgel."

Mark laughed at that, not because he thought it particularly witty on my part, but rather because of my use of cudgel, which he noted sounds like something sweet and cute, kind of pet-like. "Here, little cudgel!"

I don't why cudgel popped out of my mouth rather than the more pedestrian term club, but that's what a cudgel is. There's nothing cute or fluffy about a cudgel or the verb form to cudgel, which means to beat something -- or someone. Though, for what it's worth, cudgel and cuddle are separated by a mere single definition in Webster's Third International Dictionary.

Webster's defines cudgel as:

1. noun, a short heavy stick that is shorter than a quarterstaff and is used as an instrument of punishment or a weapon.
2. verb, to beat with or as with a cudgel: belabor, thrash, drub, rack.

I was amused to see that a couple of dictionaries offered idiomatic expressions linking the term to the act of thinking: "I cudgeled my brains to recall her name" on Dictionary.com and "cudgeled his brains for a rhyme" in Webster's. Ouch -- that's some painful pondering!