Hocked?

[Vince]

While chasing a rabbit today (don’t ask), I ended up at Bierce’s Devil Dictionary, and the definition for abattoir has this:

A place where cattle slaughter kine. It is commonly placed at some distance from the haunts of our species, in order that they who devour the flesh may not be hocked by the sight of the blood.

This is supported by the scan (this is from the one on the Wiki entry; the IA version linked to in our production is pretty blurry):

I can find no definition of “hocked,” in M-W or my (small) IOS OED or in a wider internet search, that would fit that sentence. Unless David can find one in the big OED, surely this should be “shocked”; what does anyone else think?

[David]

Interesting. The best the "big" OED could do with "hock, v." is this one:

(You'll get the full size of that image if you open in its own window/tab.) I doubt Bierce is using this metaphorically. When I stuck the phrase in Google its "AI" said it was a typo for "shocked"... I got no hits in Google Scholar, either.

FWIW!

[David]

P.s. I notice, too, that the University of Georgia Press's 2000 edition of Bierce's "Dictionary" has corrected this entry:



In their "note on the text" the editors discuss sources, and say: "All definitions from the 1911 edition are included as published with only minor modifications, primarily corrections of typographical errors." (pp. xxv-xxvi).

Again, FWIW!

[Alex Cabal]

Yes I think this is an obvious typo for "shocked", you can go ahead and
make a PR to fix it.

On 4/11/26 5:54 PM, Vince wrote:
> While chasing a rabbit today (don’t ask), I ended up at Bierce’s /Devil
> Dictionary/, and the definition for abattoir has this:

>
> A place where cattle slaughter kine. It is commonly placed at some
> distance from the haunts of our species, in order that they who
> devour the flesh may not be hocked by the sight of the blood.
>
>
> This is supported by the scan (this is from the one on the Wiki entry;
> the IA version linked to in our production is pretty blurry):

> ScreenFloat Shot of Safari on 2026-04-11 at 17-51-43.png
>
> I can find no definition of “hocked,” in M-W or my (small) IOS OED or in
> a wider internet search, that would fit that sentence. Unless David can
> find one in the big OED, surely this should be “shocked”; what does
> anyone else think?
>

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[C T]

Most of his "definitions" started in some form in his various newspapers (the "News Letter" is where this one is sourced from), but finding *those* in scanned form online is an exercise in madness, as I discovered to my displeasure when I collected his verse.

A couple of scholars have been publishing 'complete' collections of everything the man wrote (as well as a complete bibliography). At some point in the future it may be worth going through the sources from their work to find any 'additional' definitions that may have been missed.

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