macing
n.— «Former Allegheny County Sheriff Pete DeFazio was following a western Pennsylvania political tradition when he coerced employees to contribute to his campaigns.…After all, this was the way they always did it around here: employees either backed their bosses and paid up, or they were harassed and threatened and sent off to work in some county Siberia.…Judgment day has come for the party bosses of western Pennsylvania, who continue the practice known as macing. The U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh has seen to that.» —“Judgment day” Beaver County Times, Allegheny Times (Pennsylvania) Nov. 26, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Kim from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, remembers her Alabama-born mother asking, Where are you proging today? The word progue, also spelled prog, is a bit of dialect meaning “to poke around” or “to ramble.” In the UK, this word, from a Germanic root...
What’s up with ketchup? The shifting history and spelling of the name of this condiment. For centuries, ketchup was a fishy sauce originating in Asia—the tomatoes came only later! Plus, a new book shows what’s lost when a language dies: when there...