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keelhaul
[ keel-hawl ]
verb (used with object)
- Nautical. to haul (an offender) under the bottom of a ship and up on the other side as a punishment.
- to rebuke severely.
keelhaul
/ ˈkiːlˌhɔːl /
verb
- to drag (a person) by a rope from one side of a vessel to the other through the water under the keel
- to rebuke harshly
Word History and Origins
Word History and Origins
Origin of keelhaul1
Example Sentences
“When we’re moving again—if we ever are—you open your mouth, and I’ll keelhaul you!”
On the web, I’m convinced that it’s more productive to produce and pass on helpful, positive ideas than to keelhaul people with harmful, negative ones.
Battleship It’ll keelhaul you till you're sober.
In a poem called “Gift Horses” he notes how “the Devil is commissioned/to harm, to keelhaul us with loss, with knowledge/of how all things splendid are disfigured by small/and small.”
But I left out all such stuff, because I knew it would after all amount to nothing, if I should set it off against a quite different purgatory and tempest into which we male-kind particularly are thrown, if we are so unfortunate as to keelhaul ourselves, that is to say, fall in love, which in my poor opinion is a slight foretaste of hell, as well as of heaven.
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