1. to inflict severe punishment on 2. to criticize severely
This word appears in a review by Terry Eagleton (my favorite popularizer of literary theory) of a new book by Richard Dawkins: "Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding."
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