skunkery

English

Etymology

skunk +‎ -ery

Noun

skunkery (countable and uncountable, plural skunkeries)

1. (countable) A place where skunks are raised.
   • 1906, Hunter-trader-trapper, page 29:

     In fact, he will take pride in his calling , and will not “whimper” when asked about his skunkery.

   • 2019, Tim Davenport, David Walters, The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs, Vol. I: Building Solidarity on the Tracks, 1877-1892, Haymarket Books, →ISBN:

     In Michigan, a skunkery promises such profits that within a generation an aristocratic family will be founded as notable as that of the Astors or the Vanderbilts.

   • 2021, Hermon Basil Laymon, Fur Farming for Profit, with Especial Reference to Skunk Raising, Good Press:

     This is why it seems desirable to establish a skunkery close to or in a city. Even in the country the neighbors will help out. The farmers will be only too […]

2. (countable) A place, activity, or institution occupied or instituted by despicable or skunkish people.
   • 1983, John Masefield, Audrey Napier-Smith, Letters to Reyna, London : Buchan & Enright

     I felt that he had been murdered by the skunks in one of the skunkeries called ministries: & as I began to read for this, someone did a book on the theme […]

   • 1984, John Masefield, ‎ Peter Vansittart, John Masefield's Letters from the Front, 1915-1917, page 23:

     a skunkery . Platforms, manifestoes, utopianisms, factional vendettas — all were trivial beside the sufferings in Flanders and on the seas, the lacerations inflicted both by the crook and the idealist.

   • 2020, Bertis D. English, Civil Wars, Civil Beings, and Civil Rights in Alabama's Black Belt, page 105:

     Some Perry county Democrats believed the term skunk was a fitting description for the Republican Party, so they offered the noble Democratic citizens of Alabama versus the "skunkery” as a proper epithet for the 1870 elections.

3. (uncountable) skunkish behavior.
   • 1909 November, Lionel Josaphare, “Fictitious History of the World”, in The Overland Monthly, volume 54, number 5, page 474:

     "Treachery? You meant skunkery, didn't you? "

   • 2004, Peter Vansittart, John Paul Jones: A Restless Spirit, page 40:

     It is easy to be wise and cocksure 200 years after the events that I hesitate to write yet; I do not know enough, but I do know that skunks in power make him a scapegoat and murdered him for their own dirty skunkery and its results.

   • 2013, Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound:

     A packed jury and a judge interested in the case, is mere skunkery.

   • 2015, Gilbert Highet, Harold Bloom, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature, Oxford University Press, USA, →ISBN, page 461:

     His chief complaint against the era of skunkery was its pettiness.

4. (uncountable) A bad smell.
   • 1977, Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Smoley, First Flowering: The Best of the Harvard Advocate:

     The inflation in business, the blah in economics, the asinine instruction in literature, are all of a perfume, a whorefume, a skunkery, of one smell, of one root at bottom.·