Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A violent protest against the drinking of alcohol in which the protester attacks the bar with a hatchet.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

hatchet +‎ -ation, coined by Carry Nation (1846-1911) to describe her own acts of vandalism. Possibly a pun on agitation?

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Examples

  • This is how the Senate Bar, a Topeka saloon favored by state officials, fell to a Nation attack or, using another of her neologisms, a “hatchetation”: “I ran behind the bar,” she wrote, smashed the mirror and all the bottles under it; picked up the cash register, threw it down; then broke the faucets of the refrigerator, opened the door and cut the rubber tubes that conducted the beer.

    LAST CALL DANIEL OKRENT 2010

  • This is how the Senate Bar, a Topeka saloon favored by state officials, fell to a Nation attack or, using another of her neologisms, a “hatchetation”: “I ran behind the bar,” she wrote, smashed the mirror and all the bottles under it; picked up the cash register, threw it down; then broke the faucets of the refrigerator, opened the door and cut the rubber tubes that conducted the beer.

    LAST CALL DANIEL OKRENT 2010

  • Prof. GRACE: Her hatchetation, which was her word that she substituted for agitation.

    Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life 2001

  • Prof. GRACE: That was soon after she started her crusade, when she did her hatchetation in Topeka, which was in February 1901.

    Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life 2001

Comments

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  • An image of Carrie Nation, the hatchet-wielding bar-busting battle-axe of the Temperance Movement in the US is here.

    December 8, 2011