flagellist

English

Etymology

Latin flagellum (“whip”) + -ist

Noun

flagellist (plural flagellists)

1. One who administers punishment by whipping.
   • 1874, The Pennsylvania School Journal - Volume 23, page 74:

     Keats, of the noted Eton school, was perhaps the best flagellist of this century, and it is said of him in Cooper's History of the Rod, that on one occasion, when a confirmation was to be held for the school, each master was requested to make out a list of candidates from his own form.

   • 1897 November, Edward A. Irving, “Tiger Majesty”, in Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, volume 162, number 985, page 704:

     They hold the head of the defendant, he nowise resisting, upon the ground, and bare his thighs, while the falgellist administers the twenty strokes with a flat bamboo cricket-bat.

   • 1967, Charles A. Perkins, Fiji: Many Flowering Islands, page 221:

     I sit with the doctor and his wife at dinner and tell them about my experience with the Indian flagellists.

2. One who whips him or herself as an act of religious penitence; flagellant.
   • 1853, Isaac Taylor, Fanaticism, page 95:

     The Christian flagellist might, it is probable, draw as much blood from his back in a year, as did the frantic priest of Moloch from his sides and arms ; or perhaps more ; but yet it were better done with the Scourge than with the Knife.

   • 1882, Robert Young, Anonymous personages:

     A proud, a vain, an envious, a jealous, an uncharitable heart may beat as well under the hair shirt of the self-torturing flagellist as under the purple robes of the monarch ; and Antony in his dreary cell and Simon Stylites on his lonely pillar may have been as far from the kingdom of heaven as the sensual Belshazzar at his luxurious banquet, or the worldly-minded Pilate in his tesselated hall.

   • 2009, Nora Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama, page 107:

     Just as we see him assuring the Jesuit flagellist that he will be glad to try penance some other day, or telling us that he did not think it expedient to die for his faith, we see in his work that personal integrity is situational, a performance calculated to appeal to a particular audience.

3. One who whips others or is whipped by others as a sexual fetish.
   • 1950, James Barr, Quatrefoil: a novel, page 310:

     Then comes the next and the next until the sadist, the flagellist, the criminally insane demand their places, and society ceases to exist.

   • 1954, Selections from Freedom - Volume 3, page 6:

     Many people advocate the tightening of the law both to protect children from flagellists and to suppress flagellant pornography.

   • 1969, Ted Perry, The final amendment, page 77:

     She wore short, black boots with pointed toes and long, long spiked heels; it was like a costume, a flagellist's would be the closest description.

   • 1986, Reinhold Grimm, Jost Hermand, Blacks and German Culture, page 43:

     The analogy which Flossie sees among the image of the buttocks, the act of urination and her eventual flagellist fetish documents a representative course of associations for the fin de siècle perception of the sexual act.

4. One who is abusive or punishing.
   • 1961, Labor Law Journal - Volume 12, page 123:

     No reasonable man dare gainsay that it is not the function of government to constitute itself as a flagellist for either side of the industrial problem.

   • 1969, Comment: Communist Fortnightly Review - Volume 7, page 307:

     The new seven-strong cabinet with Mellish as the new flagellist, is consistent with the anti-democratic trend towards corporate rule.

   • 1989, Thomas Edwin Utley, Charles Moore, Simon Heffer, A Tory Seer: The Selected Journalism of T. E. Utley, page 70:

     There are some very puzzling aspects of the discussion : it is a puzzle, for example, how Gilmour (in his smart way) can say that he is not asking for much more money to be spent than Howe already overspends every year (or that is what it sounds like); because if that is so, how can it be that Howe is some sort of manic flagellist who enjoys bleeding the economy to death just for the sake of religion?

   • 1993, Paul Sharrad, Readings in Pacific literature, page 162:

     Nor does he quite satisfy those flagellists who would see him as a stereotype of anti-colonialism, for he declines to be mindlessly abusive about European values or sentimental about Samoan ones.