knobkerry

English

Alternative forms

• knobkierie

Etymology

(deprecated template usage) [etyl] Dutch knop (“knob, button”) + (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Dutch kerrie or kirri (“stick”).

Noun

knobkerry (plural knobkerries)

1. A wooden stick like a club, used in southern Africa.
   • 1993, John Banville, Ghosts:

     I close my eyes and see the pickers bending on the green hillsides, their saffron robes and slender, leaf-brown hands; I see the teeming docks where half-starved fellows with legs like knobkerries sticking out of ragged shorts have stencilled wooden chests and call to each other in parrot shrieks; I even see the pottery works where this cup was spun out of cloud-white clay one late-nineteenth-century summer afternoon by an indentured apprentice with a harelip and a blind sister waiting for him in their hovel up a pestilential back lane.